Percy Jackson and the Communists
by Lucky Sea
Summary: The skies bring an oppressive heat, the forests spark an unending blaze, the oceans boil its uncountable swimmers. In the last days of the human race, the son of man and God finds a candle that brings forth hope, and revolution.
1. Chapter 1

It was the hottest winter New York City had ever known. The middle of December felt as hot as an ordinary day in spring. I plodded across the streets towards Madison Square Garden for an appointment. A once-beautiful blue warbler, a type of migratory bird that passes through New York City in the spring, lay dead on the pavement at my feet. The visitor had been trampled by hundreds of tiny black ants that desecrated its body, entering tiny orifices like the eyes and beak, and removing flesh and feathers from its still warm head. An ugly brown cockroach, racing from the sewers, entered the fray. It chased away the ants, and chewed for itself the finest section of the warbler's breast.

Ahead of me, two fierce dogs barked at each other. One, a Golden Retriever, was large and had fur like the colour of the rays of the sun and a bark that could be heard across the street. His bitter foe, a black Labrador, was smaller, and quieter, but snapped his fangs with malicious intent. The Golden Retriever, strangely enough, wore no collar unlike the Labrador, and so mocked the smaller dog as the latter's owner yanked it back. The golden purebred raked his paw across the Labrador's eyes, and the black beast ripped free of his handler's grip and sank his teeth into his foe's front leg.

Walking along the 8th Avenue, I looked at myself in the mirrors of the stores lining the street. My appearance is dreadful. I'm as lean and skinny as I was when I was sixteen, with wrinkles on my face and weariness in my sea green eyes. I pass by mirror after mirror, the same green eyes, green eyes, blue eyes, green eyes.

Hold on a second. Blue eyes?

I thought I might have imagined it, so I walk backwards and watch my reflection closely. The same wrinkles. The same eyebrows. The same unsmiling lips. But for a second I had thought I saw someone different in the mirror. As if my own reflection was not me. It was only a glimpse. But a blue eyed man with blonde hair and a beautifully symmetrical face smiled back cruelly at me for that second. Or so I had imagined.

As I stared, another figure approached me from behind, growing larger at speed, its face as indistinct as the faces that a myopic sees. I turned. Pedestrians walked to and fro. No one approached this man scared at the sight of his own reflection.

Minutes later I came to the entrance of Madison Square Garden. From afar I could see the promotional banner that bore the faces of hard, angry men longing to do battle. The towering mirror planes of the Garden seemed like a fortress, imposing, impenetrable. Its sentries were a crowd of hundreds, like ants decimating a corpse, queueing for their turn to enter. Within they would find a spectacle of war, a champion of fistfighting meeting a champion of all forms of fighting, and the singular victor who emerged forth. I stare carefully at the faces around me, searching for black hair, black eyes, and round cheeks.

As I waltz my way to the front of the queue, bumping away angry spectators, I notice a short woman with long, flowing black hair that dipped to the middle of her back, wearing a parka. I know it's her as soon as I see the parka. Only a foreigner would consider sixty degrees Fahrenheit parka temperature. I tap her shoulders, and she turns. The first thing I notice are her eyes, the shape of teardrops, widening in recognition. She is young, even though age can be hard to tell with Asians, with no lines across her attractive smiling cheeks. Her head is shaped like a ball, and her chin is heart-shaped. She gives me a pleasant smile.

"Thank you for coming." The black haired Chinese woman says, solemnly.

"I am ready." I answered.

"You knew him, didn't you?" The petite woman gives me an inquisitive look.

"I knew _a_ Jason Grace." I paused to consider my next words. "He was a boy to whom men would kneel."

"Tonight, are you prepared to stand?"

"I am ready."

"Very good. Let's go." And with that, we entered Madison Square Garden.

* * *

Tonight is fight night. But the real battle will not be in the ring. Once the boxers go to war, our mission begins. As soon as we show our tickets and are let through by security, we can hear the trumpets of war, calling for massacre. Black banners. Deep throated chanting. Suited men smiling as they take photos with skinheads.

"Our enemies are everywhere." She says softly, so that only I can hear.

"We have an ally in the ring tonight." I answer.

The chatter is dominated by talks of killing, domination, punishment, humiliation. Grace will do this to him. Grace will do that to him. Otherwise there is an appraising mood towards the government's deregulation of industry, anti-immigrant raids, and crackdowns on socialism. This winter, the president will crown his champion in glory, next winter, the champion will raise his president to re-election. Victory is a certainty. Victory in this winter, and the next, and every winter until the burning Earth summons no more winter chills during December months.

The two of us identify three key locations. One, the ring and our seats inside them. Two, the dressing room occupied by Jason Grace and his retinue. Three, the dressing room occupied by that of Grace's opponent. Our ally. Tight security keeps the dressing rooms out of bounds for members of the public. No ordinary human can pass through.

I, however, am Percy Jackson. I am a Greek demigod, son of Poseidon the sea god, and son to my mother Sally Jackson. I've got a few tricks.

Searching the backpack slung over my shoulder, I offer a tattered, dirty, old New York Yankees' cap to my companion. She raises her eyebrows.

"There are no basketball games here tonight, Percy."

"The Yankees are a baseball team, Eirawen! Never mind that. Put it on now." I lower my voice and lean towards her, shielding her from view with my body. Eirawen looks a little uncomfortable at my vicinity. "Wearing this will turn you invisible."

"I see." She nods and takes the cap. "And what about you?"

I close my eyes, and let the magic of the Mist do the talking. The Mist is a veil over mortal eyes. It saves them from seeing monsters of myth in their true, hideous forms. The Mist's power makes Cyclops and snake women and giant demonic hounds look like normal men, women, and dogs. Only those infused with immortal blood like myself, and a select few mortals, can see past this veil. I can also manipulate the Mist to change my appearance. When I'm ready, I open my eyes and look at Eirawen once more.

"What do you see?" I ask.

Eirawen widens her dark brown, teardrop-shaped eyes.

"You're a security guard! And you have a beard!"

Why in Poseidon's name do I have a beard? Whatever. I take Eirawen's hand, and confidently walk across the lounge towards the barricade protecting the Knicks' dressing room. Past the barricade of metal barriers manned by security guards is a route with many turns that leads to the dressing room of the New York Knicks. That's where Jason Grace is residing, right now. A similar barricade safeguards the dressing room of the New York Rangers, inhabited by the man who calls himself Krasnaya.

I turn to my side. Nothing but thin air. The sensation of a warm hand in my right hand remains. Good. She's wearing the cap.

The security guards look at me curiously, but approve of the fake ID that I conjured through the Mist, and let me through. In reality, I handed them my ATM card. If that had been confiscated, I didn't have a plan to convince my bank to give me a new one.

The further we get from the barricade, the quieter everything is. I trod on the matted carpet alone, but hear two sets of footsteps. I can hear her breathe, feel her warm hand clutching mine, smell her perfume. The image of the dead blue warbler, with a hundred ants desecrating its body, came unbeckoned like a premonition.

The Knicks' locker room itself is two nondescript, wooden doors. The wood is light brown, smooth, elegant, and cold to the touch. Feeling the wood in my hand, I am reminded of the coffins that Camp Half-Blood uses to bury demigods who have fallen in battle. How many of those have I seen? Charles Beckendorf, Silena Beauregard, Michael Yew. Each a sacrifice for the Olympians' continued glory, each cold and quiet in their sleek forever homes.

"I'm going in." I whisper to Eirawen. Her hand, now cold despite the lacklustre winter, grips firmly onto mine. Approval. I open both doors.

* * *

As soon as we come in, we are swamped by noise and light and people. A few eyes turn towards me. Only me. They cannot see Eirawen. I give a friendly smile, and their curiosity is satisfied. With my right hand firmly gripping the warmth, I swallow my fear and walk into the fascist crowd as if I belonged. I take a seat in the first vacant locker seat I see that's closest to the door. The seat is broad, and I only take up half of it, leaving the other half for the still-invisible Eirawen to sit.

The lair of the fascists is crowded. The Knicks locker room is a circular interior shape, with only one exit and entrance, the one we just came through. Directly opposite the entrance is the banner of the mixed martial arts champion who has come to challenge the boxing champion. It's an image of a golden lightning bolt surrounded by a blue circle, upon a white background. Some of the other seats are vacant, the others are occupied uniformly by muscular, handsome, young white men. About a dozen or more people form a circle around the centre of the room, cheering as a half-naked, muscular man in the middle performs Superman punches and flying knees against a padholder. Every strike he lands is met with _oohs_ and _aahs_.

The President's champion ends his exercise with a spinning back elbow against the pads. _Crack_. It is loud enough to make me wince for the padholder's hands. _He is no ordinary fighter_. I thought. He allows a coach to remove his gloves and his retinue to sing their worship as he rests. _There are too many people here. Too many for what we have come here to do._

His eyes turn. Away from his hands, being taped by a coach, and towards me. He is not seeing Percy Jackson. I'm in disguise.

"What are you holding on to," the enemy says softly but audibly, "Percy Jackson?"

I release Eirawen's still-invisible hand immediately. _Shoo! Run!_ I pretend not to have heard a word, and continue to loiter around the edges of the circle of worshippers. A skinhead eyes me suspiciously.

"What did you let go of, Percy Jackson?" The enemy says loudly, above the din of the chamber. Silence. A solitary, accusing index finger faces me. Every face in the room is now looking towards me.

"I'm not holding on to anything." I say quickly. "I haven't let go of anything."

"You were holding on to hope. And you just let go of her." Grace gives me with a refined, dignified smile. _He knows_. I thought._ That can't be possible. How does he know?_ The worshippers face me, and for the first time I realise their hands are not empty. One man in a red cap with the words, "Make America Great Again!" has a semi-automatic assault rifle. Beside him, is a giant who must be at least six foot four, and is wearing body armour from head to toe like the ones riot police wear. Just beside Grace is a heavily tattooed skinhead with a large knife as long as my forearm. Almost everyone in the room has at least one gun on them. Bullet straps and ammunition pouches are discarded haphazardly around the room.

"I thought this was supposed to be a fight." I said hesitatingly.

"Strange. We were thinking the same thing." Jason Grace replies. He raises his right palm as if taking a vow. "Wehrmacht!"

"Pledge your life to our leader, the spear of the West, the saviour of the master race, the son of Jupiter, Jason Grace!" roars one of them, a bearded man wearing a red bandana with a black cross against a white circle on in its centre. The rest of the worshippers raise their right arms in that dreaded, diagonal, stiff arm salute. The salute of the ancient Romans that I'd never seen done even in Camp Jupiter.

"Hail to the Chief! Hail to the Chief!" They cry in unison. Their guns continue to beat the ground. _Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam._ "Hail to the Chief!"

"Pledge your life!" the man in the bandana yells at me, pointing his stiff arm at my face, "If you're not a traitor, you'll eradicate the Communists tonight!"

A traitor. Eradicate the Communists. These words sounded familiar. Perhaps I had said them myself once, or many times, many years ago. Who had I said these words to, who I was speaking of, I cannot recall. Words of anger are familiar to everyone. The rage of adolescence that is supposed to leave a fully matured adult can inhabit a person for the rest of his days. I've spent a lifetime angry at the powers that be. It's taken me just as long to understand where to direct that anger towards, and for the savage retinue of Grace, it would take them even longer. Maybe they would never understand.

"I'm betraying no one. I'm pledging my life to no one." I growl. "And no god owns my life!"

_No one except the woman I love_.

The fascists raise their guns. Over a dozen barrels stare at me. An index finger wraps around each trigger. There are rifles and the retarded everywhere I turn. Even the son of Poseidon can't survive this much lead in his body.

"Hold."

At the moment that I'm prepared to die, the guns lower, and Jason Grace makes his way through his brethren towards me. He is taller than I remembered, easily six foot three by now, and maybe more. By far the largest man in the welterweight division. He was muscular and veiny, but lanky. In every pound of flesh was muscle and nerves serving one single purpose: to kill a man.

"Why do you struggle, Percy?" The voice spoke, sweet as honey, yet brimming with bloodlust. "Your leader has everything under control. All you have to do is follow instructions."

"What instructions?" I snap.

"Just give up this mission. I've never broken the law. I'm only doing what I was told. You should, too." He wraps his arm around my shoulder, as he did when we were still comrades-in-arms.

More lies. Faked innocence. Flaunted anguish. Disguised destruction and endless pleas for pity. All hallmarks of a fascist. I know what happens if I fall for it. I know that he will demand endless sacrifice from my person, treating me as a slave while calling me a comrade, and punish me with cruelty even as he indoctrinates me to thank him for his mercy.

I know, because I am the son of Poseidon. I have been falling for these lies since the day I was born.

"The comrade I had is dead. Jason Grace fell in battle ten years ago. And _you_ are a mockery of his memory." I reply. Grace, his lips curled in an eerily benevolent grin, gripped the handle of the door and pushed it open.

"I invite you to watch the fight. The spear of the West never loses a battle. Only my enemies fall tonight." _He's letting us go?_ But Grace blocked the gap between myself and safety with his own body. Eirawen had no chance to slip through. "You will let go, and submit yourself to me."

"There won't be a fight. There will only be a beating, and it will be you who suffers it." I answered. "I will rise to my feet, and Krasnaya will bring you to your knees!"

Grace moves like a blur. First I see his right arm wrap itself around the back of my head, then I am vaguely aware of a bone-crushing grip on my right wrist. I witness a glimpse of his back turning towards me, then I am hurled upwards towards the ceiling as if I were the projectile of a catapult, and find myself on my back against the floor. _Thud. _A second later, my back erupts in fiery pain. I raise my head to look at the door slamming shut in my face.

Right beside me is an old, tattered New York Yankees cap.

* * *

I do my best to maintain long, comfortable strides. I still look like a burly security guard with a beard. But the investigation has been compromised. Eirawen is in mortal danger. I cannot take on several score men with armour and bullets and knives _and_ the son of Jupiter, all at once, all alone. So I find myself at the locker room of the New York Rangers. The same smooth wood as the Knicks' locker room door. Doubt briefly crosses my mind. But no, I haven't gone back the way I just came. I'm sure of it. I knock, and push open the unlocked door.

The Rangers' locker room is lightless, to a point where shade and shadow are indistinct. The room is also shaped like an oval in contrast to the Knicks' locker room, and much larger. It could fit twice or thrice the people that the latter did. It's also eerily silent. Have I intruded upon a mausoleum? Whereas the fascists enjoy a cacophony of noise, the Communist prefers to listen to the silence. I wonder he hears here, inside the quietest of places. Perhaps the dead would know best.

The man who calls himself Krasnaya sits in the centre of the oval room. He is so still when meditating that I first mistook him for a statue. I can only tell it's him because there is no one else inside, except myself. His face is turned away. His whole body is wrapped in black, to the point that I cannot tell shirt from skin.

"Welcome, Percy Jackson." said the Communist, without looking towards me. He speaks with a melodramatic baritone that's about two octaves higher than the voice that bellows in the ring. He is unmoving. Still.

"I have bad news, Krasnaya." I answered.

"I am not Krasnaya." The man says. He rises, and approaches. He comes close enough to the lighted hallway that his mouth and jawline become visible, even though his eyes and hair remain dark as night. The man offers me a half-smile with tattered lips that bleed every fight. "Yet."

"Then who are you?"

"I am the man outside the ring."

"And who is Krasnaya?"

"He is the monster inside the ring."

"And where are you when Krasnaya is in the ring?" I ask.

"Ah, that." The Communist gives me a mellow smile. "I'm enjoying the best view. The first person view."

"Krasnaya, the fascists brought guns and knives. They intend to kill you tonight. If not in the ring, then as soon as you leave it."

The Communist avoids my gaze, troubled. He stares at his hands, all covered with layer upon layer of white hand wraps. Then he stands, walks to a full-body mirror wrapped in darkness, and examines his shadowy figure as if he were a soul residing in a body that was not his own. The Communist looks at a red banner, crimson like the colour of fresh human blood, resting in one of the closets closest to the light, the one which he always proudly carried with him to war. And finally, he closes his eyes, as if he were looking for a place of inspiration that he would be blinded to by being able to see. One long moment passes. Suddenly his eyes open, and he turns to face me.

"Mortal men do not survive gunshots and knife stabbings." He says.

"And neither will you." I agree.

"But Krasnaya is no mortal man. If I stay inside the ring, if I let him stay inside of me, he will remain invincible. Forever unbeaten." He says, without the slightest look of doubt on his face.

And here I was, thinking that Jason Grace and his fascists were the crazy ones. Everything is going wrong. Eirawen is missing. My cover is blown. The Communists are walking into a slaughterhouse. The Fascists are operating the slaughterhouse. I haven't discovered a single thing about that which I'd come here to investigate.

We expected this. Eirawen and I assumed the worst, from the beginning. Our plan A was to isolate and confront Jason Grace before the fight. Failing that, our plan B was to wait until the fight began, when all eyes would gaze upon the events within the ring and not those outside it. The truth can be found from evidence, even without concession from the suspect, even without witness testimony.

"Buy me time." I order, placing my hands on his shoulders. "Don't knock him out before the tenth round, but do knock him out by the twelfth. It must not come to a decision. And don't lose!"

"A knockout after the tenth it is." He nods at me with determination and trust. "And what will you do?"

_A good question_, I thought. _But Eirawen saw this coming. She assumed our plan would unravel. The only question was how to use this failure to advance our mission. And that's up to me._

"I'm going to ensure that they don't fire a single bullet at you." I answer. "You will leave that ring alive. Not as Krasnaya. But as who you are right now."

"Alone?" He asked. "You're trying to do this all on your own?"

He doesn't know about Eirawen's involvement, I remembered. She asked me not to tell him. They were not acquainted, she said, so if she died her death wouldn't affect him. It struck me then as the only thing in our plan that didn't quite make sense. Perhaps there were other reasons.

"No. Krasnaya is on my side " I answer. He grins at me, then takes a step back into the darkness. His eyes close. He is sitting again, with his legs comfortably seated on a cushion on the floor instead of any of the locker seats. He nodded gently at my words, but said nothing. _This is it_. I thought. _Krasnaya comes_.

The hair on my forearm begins to tingle. The locker room feels warmer. A long moment passes. And then another. And another. I wait. The Communist's eyes open.

"Slay him." I say. He stares at me with the wide, haunted eyes of a demon's that is dreaming. There is malice etched in his visage. The man I had spoken to a moment ago is gone. _This_ is Krasnaya.

"You ask. I deliver." His voice has an unearthly depth to it, like the howls of the unborn demons within the primordial soup of Chaos, the first and greatest Protogenos.

"Blood spills upon a white flag, and calls me forth. I bring justice to the proletariat. I bring ruin to the bourgeoisie. My right hand is a hammer and my left hand is a sickle. I am Krasnaya!"

* * *

I am born at the last days of the human race. I grew up watching seven billion human beings walk into the gilded and prosperous path. They sought to behave themselves before the gods, and behoove these deities to protect and nourish them. Our miserable pleas have been met with curses, as the equilibrium of fire and ice in this melting, burning world is disturbed decisively to the bowels of inferno. As the global temperatures rise, as the Earth and its people both grow poorer, and the angry Mother Nature lashes out against her parasitic children, I have chosen to rise above pleading for mercy. I chose to reestablish peace between the Earth and its inhabitants, before the mother and her children mutually annihilated each other.

The children of this planet have been led astray. We demigods have been led astray. Our rulers, our gods, they are not worthy of praise and worship. I've found out the truth. They have led us into this conflict with Gaia because it seals the bondage between us and them. Subsist by destroying Gaia, or die. The cut of their whip is gentle when they place a sword against your throat.

Our leaders are leading us into the chasm. Any who do not march forward are shot. The chasm is _Tartarus_. There is only ever escalating despair within. I choose to walk away from the chasm. And I am not the first.

Time and again, across the long march of history, the despotic rule of gods and kings have been imperiled. Famine. Volcano eruptions. Floods. Slave rebellions. This world of fire and ice brings fluctuating periods of calm and crisis. But as endless as the crimes of these higher powers may be, their rule over the lives and bodies of common mortals is unending. It is a dictatorship that continues to this day. Men braver than me, far more intelligent than me, with far greater organisation and backing than me, have all fallen at the feet of the gods. Their memory is tarnished, their names a mere bogeyman for mothers to scare their young children with.

Eirawen and I thought that there had to be a reason as to why. It wasn't that things had to get worse before they got better, or that it simply wasn't the right time for revolutionary change. There were times in history that the gods overcame all odds to retain their power, and there were times when the gods conceded nothing when they had overwhelming momentum on their side. We thought that the gods had one extra advantage to unravel the plans of rebellious mortals. They had the overwhelming advantage of brute force, that was true, and brutishness assists in all struggles. They, and the deluded mortals who allied with them, seemingly never made a miscalculation. Not a strategic error. Not a break in alliance. Like watching the Golden State Warriors, rebellion is simply swept aside like leaves in the wind. And there was their true advantage. They could make a mistake, and get away with it.

Because they've already experienced this before.

Eirawen's theory goes like this. Amongst the countless different worlds and timelines of the multiverse, both the gods and us mortals only experience _one_ universe and one timeline at any time. They're playing the same game of chess as we are. The rules are stacked in their favour to begin with, but if we were smart, we could still beat them despite the handicaps. Their true advantage lies in them remembering where they have made mistakes in one game, then transferring their memories of this game to that of themselves in another timeline where they are simultaneously playing the same game. Crucially, the Olympians in the second universe receive the knowledge of the imminent future, and hence are able to preemptively correct mistakes and errors. And these universes do not coexist all at the same time. For every universe that the Olympians choose to abandon, they can freeze in place the sequence of events like a fossilised animal frozen in stone, never allowing their mistakes to haunt them.

Each circumstance of rebellion, each tactical and strategic move. They know what to do not just from experience of past events. They have lived this lifetime of my rebellion, and crushed me underneath as they did so many others. Transferring their memories across timelines is the ultimate weapon of the gods. We came here to prove this theory true. And if it were true, we wanted to adopt this weapon for our own uses. To pass on the lessons we have learnt from this world into the next. To save Gaia, our planet, from the inferno.

The first step is to force a mistake on the part of the gods. Those neo-Nazis came here with the express intention of killing Krasnaya. Their preparation speaks to that. Which means that _not_ _killing Krasnaya_ is a fatal mistake for the gods. If I succeed there, then there lies an opportunity to witness the world and its timeline being reset.

The second step is to steal that gift of memory from the immortals. Eirawen theorised that this gift could be handed down from the divine to mankind. Just as Prometheus brought fire from Olympus to human hands, so will I bring memory from Olympus to human minds. Her belief was that a select few mortals and demigods had already been granted this gift. And one of them was Jason Grace. If we proved that Jason knew of events that did not happen in this timeline, then that proved the gift of memory, the theory that this gift could be passed down to a mortal, and the multiverse theory true. More accurately, we needed proof that he is acting to prevent a future that he is certain will inevitably happen. For who knows what the future holds, except a time traveller?

This is what we're here for. Krasnaya versus Grace is the pivot upon which the future changes. The Nazis' preparation speaks to that. It must change in _our favour._

I timed my departure from the Rangers' locker room with the ring walk from both main event fighters. Wearing Annabeth's cap of invisibility, I remained unseen as I sneaked my way back to the Knicks' locker room. Even so, I stayed clear of anyone wearing a uniform. I did not know where Jason's power ended. When I returned to the spot where I had been cast out of just half an hour ago, I arrived unseen.

I lay my palm on the metal handle of the wooden door, then recoil as a shock of electricity runs through my body. _He's still here?_ But I'd just watched the ring walk from afar! No, it's a lingering aftertaste of the son of Jupiter's power.

I gently push on the door. Finding surprising resistance, I shove it open. _Thump_. Something's fallen on the other side. Whatever it is, it's obscuring the hinges, only allowing me to slip through a small crack of the barely opened door, where darkness waits. I put my foot into the black, and fumble for a light switch in my blindness. The slanting curvature of a button makes my fingers tingle. I press.

Eirawen's sprawled body lies face-up behind the entrance.

It takes me a second before I realise that she is not breathing. I rush to her side. Her eyes are open, wide as it was when I gave her this cap I now wear. She looks fearful, terrified even. Her skin is singed. She smells of smoke. But there isn't a bruise or cut visible on her body. I try to start her heartbeat, blow air into her mouth. She remains still. I search her parka, and find what I'm looking for in a barely visible pocket. A voice recorder. Both of us have one, to record our last moments in case we perished. My fingers tremble as I begin to play hers.

The voice recorder plays a cacophony of noises, with distinct _oohs_ and _aahs._ This must have been back when we first entered the locker room. I keep my ears peeled.

_"What are you holding on to, Percy Jackson?"_ the recording asks. _"What did you let go of, Percy Jackson?"_ My teeth chatter and my hands tremble. My heartbeat is erratic. I try to hear the words that come next, yet ignore their gravity.

_"You were holding on to hope. And you just let go of her."_

I should have never let go of Eirawen. But I did. And now she is dead.

The recording chatters on, and I half-heartedly hear it while examining the murder scene. It's empty and pristine. No traces of guns and knives and Nazis. Every locker seat is clean and tidy, every inch of carpet free of litter. It's too clean to be a murder scene. I pick up my attention when I hear myself being thrown outside the door. There is chatter and exclamations of surprise as Eirawen is clearly discovered.

_"Be silent."_ That voice was Jason's. _"There is a visitor in my presence."_

"She's an assassin!" cried a male voice I did not recognise. "Execute her!"

_"She looks like she has something to say."_ Jason's voice again.

"And I'd like to say it in private." For the first time, I could hear Eirawen's quiet voice. There is more uproar and argument amongst the fascists, but Jason yells, and the sound of a door opening and feet walking is clear. Silence ensues, and I check to ensure that the recording isn't broken.

"Why are you so certain you'll lose tonight?" Eirawen's voice again, coming just as the fourth or fifth round began.

_"Mmm? Am I?"_ His voice is pleasant, making it all the more insidious.

"Those guns. Those bullets. They're all real, right? Who are they for?"

_"Those bullets go into the skulls of Communists. Like you. Like your friend."_

"Percy and I aren't Communists. Krasnaya isn't my friend. But you're admitting that you can't be sure of besting him in a boxing match?"

_"Woman, I can see through your tricks. You suspect me to be a time traveller - am I right?"_ Grace growls. There is a distinct silence before Eirawen responds.

"Yes. Yes, I do." Her voice is shaken.

_"Well, you're right. I've fought that filthy Communist before. Many times before. If this were the mixed martial arts I'd take him down and batter his face bloody, but this is boxing. I've fought him for more than fifty rounds and I still can't see a pattern to his magic. He is six feet away when I'm punching and he is all over me when I'm not. I've never even finished twelve rounds with him. He can't be beaten in a fistfight, much less killed. And he needs to die."_

"How many times have you seen this fight? How many lives have you lived?" Eirawen presses.

_"If you're talking about the worlds and timelines I can remember…I stopped counting at twenty."_

"What's your secret? How are you travelling through time? Or is it something you can't say?" More questions, all from Eirawen's voice.

_"Oh, I could tell you." _Grace says. _"You need to spill your blood in the shape of a circle. Place your bloodied palm in the middle. Meditate on an image of yourself, at some point in your life, in the very second that you want that second version of you to receive your memories. Then your memories will be sent."_

"That's all?" Eirawen's voice again. "You don't have to be a demigod or anything?"

_"Oh no, it is not. Transferring your memories across timelines demands punishment. Just as Prometheus was chained and cursed to have his liver eaten by vultures every day for all eternity, so will you be punished. And guess who your tormentor will be."_

"Not the gods?"

_"No. The power to turn déjà vu into a vision of the future, or 'time travel' as you like to call it, requires your memories to cross an immeasurable distance. Travelling across solar systems, galaxies, universes. Travelling against space and time and gravity to reach your other self. In the space between you and the other you there is Chaos himself. The First. The Creator. The oldest of the Protogenoi will annihilate your memories when you try to bring them through time. Then he will annihilate this world. All of it. Gaia and Ouranos and Pontus and the Titans and the Olympians and the demigods. And especially you."_

"If that's the case, then why are your memories of other timelines getting through?"

_"I don't know. Maybe Chaos likes me."_ Grace's voice sounds sinister. _"Maybe I have divine blood that's superior to yours."_

An unmistakable crackle of lightning plays from the recorder. Eirawen screams. There are sounds of a mad scramble for the door. Then nothing. Ten seconds pass before thunder roars, though I cannot tell if it came from outside or from the voice recorder.

And the grave is silent as I close its wooden doors on the body of a friend.

* * *

It takes me only a minute to reach the main arena itself. In that time, a break is gone, and a new round starts. I check the numbers of neon lights on the big screens. _Eleventh round_. _There's only one break left in this fight._ As soon as the boxers advance upon each other, the crowd is baying for blood. _Jason. Jason. Jason. _They cry. The fascist champion greets their wails with aggressive body shots, lowering his head as he hurls his body forward at the Communist fighter.

Krasnaya cracks his chin skywards with a left uppercut. _Jason. Jason. Jason_. The spear of the West hurls a right cross at the same instant as the Communist leaning back, striking thin air. The latter's move was so precisely timed, it was as if he knew what Grace would do before the man himself would do it.

The fascist charges in, bobbing and weaving without pattern or reason, then eats a hurricane of hooks from the Communist. Suddenly the shorter man is right behind his foe, and Jason Grace's beautiful face is bloodied. _Grace is losing_. I realised. _Just as he promised._

The crowd isn't chanting his name out of excitement. They're chanting out of despair.

The round's story repeats the same pattern. Grace plods forward behind a high guard, trying to use head movement to close the distance for a body shot with his dreaded right hook. Krasnaya, taking two steps with each punch he threw, would slam in a repeated left uppercut-right hook combination when the spear of the West stepped forward behind the high guard, and find Grace's back when he fired a punch. My eyes turn towards the ringside. Nazi apparel and munitions were being brazenly exhibited by the dozen or so fascists I had met in Eirawen's grave. Practically all of these men were in combat gear, armed from top to toe in steel helmets that covered their entire face, Kevlar armour for their torsos and groin, ammunition pouches and more armour around their thighs, shin guards, and heavy boots. They carried rifles, red rectangular shields made of iron embroidered with black swastikas that resembled the ancient Roman legionnaire shields, and fastened pistols and daggers to their belts.

_More than sufficient to kill a Communist_. I thought. _Except for Krasnaya in a ring._

A cry from the crowd draws my attention back to the fight inside the ring. Grace is on his back, Krasnaya towering above him. _A knockdown_. The referee roars _one, two, three_ but at the count of four, the bell rings for the end of the round. I rush to Krasnaya's corner. He is surrounded by coaches and cutmen.

"Who are those rifles for?" One of them is asking. The head coach, pouring water on Krasnaya's face, answers, "Focus on winning the fight!"

The Communist rises to his feet despite the break being far from over. He stares at me, then points with his left glove. My eyes follow his extended arm to the ranks of armoured fascists, then back to the southpaw boxer. He now has his left glove at his heart, as if he were trying to point at himself.

"Yes!" I yell over the din. "It's for you! Those rifles are for you!"

The head coach shoots me an angry look, and pours more water on his fighter. "Focus on winning the fight!" He shouts.

"I am." Growls the voice of the abyss.

The twelfth begins, and Krasnaya lands his left cross twice in the opening five seconds. He dances as the son of Jupiter timidly refuses to trade punches or step forward, then lands a single or double jab before hammering his straight left hand to the head and body.

"Keep hitting him, Krasnaya!" I shout. "They'll kill you if you let him get away!"

The battery becomes a bloody spectacle as the Fascist's bobbing and weaving becomes discordant with the rhythm of Krasnaya's punches, and the jarring disharmony results in a clash of fists and face instead of repeated slipping by a margin of inches. _He's lost his rhythm_, I thought. _It's only a matter of time before he loses his life_.

"It's over! It's over!" cried the referee in response to a white towel thrown into the ring from Grace's corner, now surrounded by ranks upon ranks of rifle-bearing Nazis with swastika embroidery all over their camouflage uniforms. The referee wraps his arms around Krasnaya's torso to yank him off Grace, but the incensed Communist breaks free and continues his relentless barrage on the cowering white champion. Grace peeks at his corner from behind his high guard, as Krasnaya hammers away at his body and head with hard, thumping shots.

"Help me!" He screams, before being cut off as Krasnaya lands what must have been at least the hundredth left cross against his face.

The Nazis swarm into the ring, just as we had foreseen. And one by one, Krasnaya slaughters them with his gloved fists. He is a dancing, darting demon. One second he slams a right jab into one man's temple, the next second he throws two or three left hands, and is right behind the man. In such tight quarters, with a casualty to protect, even guns and knives are worthless against the master boxer.

_Grace can't be allowed to get away!_ I thought, but I'm not the only one with those thoughts. The son of Jupiter wrestles away from the grips of his underlings, frustrating their attempts to have him flee. "I'll kill him with my own hands!" He cried. "Out of my way!"

I duck underneath the second rope and step into the ring. Already, there are four, five armoured Nazis sprawled on the ring floor, either unconscious or dead. Most of those still standing are huddled together in a corner, their glorious leader in the centre of the pack, fighting for their lives against the leaping, swinging crimson demon. One of them sees me, and breaks rank to charge. With the majority of my weight on my rear right leg, I turn my hips and hurl the hardest right hook I can muster into the Nazi's right temple. The helmeted head rocks back, but the Nazi still manages to tackle and pin me against the ropes. The two of us wrestle, and I find myself pinned against the floor. I try to push his head off me with my right hand, which seems to have sprouted another set of knuckles from the way it flops waywardly in its centre.

With my other hand I reach for a handgun, lying almost within arm's length beside the corpse of its original owner, but a heavy boot stomps on my left hand. _Crunch_. I can't feel anything below my wrist in both hands. Someone pins my head against the floor. The rest of my body bears the weight of three or four men and their armour, so heavy that I can feel my spine and ribs creaking. Looking up, I see the wide, black barrel of a rifle staring back at me.

Everywhere I turned, there were only boots and rifle barrels. So many of them that I could not tell where one man ended and another began. Far more than the group we had discovered in their lair. _The security guards!_ I realised. _They were working together all along!_ No wonder there were about twenty more people in the ring than I had first counted.

_Where is Krasnaya?_ I wondered. His red shoes were nowhere to be seen. The trail of boots and blood led to a concentration of angry voices on my left. I raised my head, straining my neck against the weight of the man against me. Jason Grace, humiliated and arrogant, had pinned Krasnaya against the ropes with a bodylock. They were barely visible, surrounded by uniformed bodies and walking suits of armour. With a howl of rage, the son of the sky god lifts his mortal enemy into the air, and smashes him against the floor. Somehow, the boxer manages to bury the mixed martial artist's head between his arm and his torso, and squeezes tightly on his neck. He gets his legs wrapped around Jason's torso, and the guillotine choke is on. The fascist soldiers, sensing their champion in danger, raise their weapons.

Krasnaya's head is surrounded by rifle barrels. He looks like a sun of blood surrounded by rays of steel. The colour of his skin is red, the colour of his eyes are red, and the colour of his hair is red. And soon, the colour of the ring floor itself would be red too. "Fire!" Someone yells.

Thunder bellows from the jubilant skies above, as Zeus announces his victorious son. _Boom_. _Boom_. _Boom._ Over and over the king of the gods roars in approval of his victory, until the Communist's head is red and fleshless.

And then, a sudden silence.

It takes me a minute to realise that Krasnaya's corpse is still stiff and taut, his choke still unrelenting. Grace is limp. Unmoving. His worshippers pray for his resurrection with unspoken words. The flesh of the Communist loosens at last, and the fascist lays still on the ground, his face slumped awkwardly.

One of the two bodies stands erect. One of the two bodies remains motionless. With my face still being pressed against the floor, only able to see from the corner of my vision, I cannot distinguish who stood and who stays.

_Grace lives and Krasnaya dies_, I tell myself. _It cannot be any other way._ But why the silence? Where is the sound of the victorious rejoicing? Feeling a slackened pressure of the hand pressing me down, I raise my head once more. No one has their gun pointed at me any longer. Every rifle's barrel is directed towards the standing man, his black hair washed in blood.

The Communist walks through the ranks of his enemies alive. He turns to face me, and a horrific mess of ripped flesh and shattered bone stares back. His eyeballs no longer exist. I cannot tell where his nose began and his mouth ended. His shattered skull exposes pink, gooey brain matter. Krasnaya raised his left hand in victory as he stands over the corpse of the gods' chosen.

_Krasnaya is invincible in the ring, _I remembered.

He silently steps out of the ring, followed by the mesmerised eyes of his killers. I stare into the face hiding behind the helmet of one of them, and to my amusement, see only horror. They could fire again, couldn't they? It wouldn't make a difference, would it?

"He's done it! Gunshots! Stabbings!" I laughed and coughed out blood at the same time. "Krasnaya lives!"

I continued to laugh even as the walking corpse fell to his knees and then collapsed on what remained of his face. I laughed as the Nazis tried in vain to resuscitate Jason Grace, just as I had tried in vain to resuscitate Eirawen. I laughed as three gunshots rang through the air, and my blood ran free along the ring floor.

Thunder bellows from the weeping skies above, as Zeus mourns his fallen son. _Boom. Boom. Boom._ It is like the sound of a ceremonial cannon, fired to celebrate victory. The lightning bolt and the trident and the grave and all the celestial powers of Olympus have been thwarted!

"For you Annabeth, my love." I whisper. "Our vengeance…is complete."

This is it. A forced error. The Communist walks beyond his grave, the boxing ring. Grace, the great fascist champion, dead before the gods. Dead once before, dead yet again. He will not be allowed to make this fatal error in the new timeline that the gods are constructing for us. All memory shall be wiped, and all knowledge of this world monopolised only by the Olympians.

Except me. I alone will remember. I scoop blood from my own gut, and draw a circle on the ground that's just wide enough for my hand to fit in. With my bloody palm inside the crimson circle, I dream of a time, years ago, when I still had a chance to save the world.

The world around me flashes, then fades like a dream fading before the dawn.

* * *

**AN: Thank you for reading. No matter whoever you are, wherever you come from, why ever you are reading this, I'm deeply touched that someone has found my creation worth an investment of their time to read.**

**I'd like to reassure the reader that what you've seen so far is just one of forty-two chapters, which will average around 6,000 words a chapter. It's a very lengthy novel that I have every intention to see through to its completion. Percy Jackson & The Communists is not a fan fiction written half-heartedly. I have evolved my ideas for years, and only now am putting them into a tale instead of mere planning phases. I will update irregularly, and go on hiatus often. But I will complete this story no matter what it takes. That is a certainty.**

**I won't make this a waste of your time. I want to write the best story ever written, the greatest tale of its time and of all time. I want to witness the peak of the storytelling mountains, and look down on all other literary works as less skilfully written tales. Please review, and let me know how far or near I am to that goal.**


	2. Chapter 2

I woke up crying. I can't explain why. It's a feeling that I last remember experiencing when I was a child, fearful even while asleep that my mother would soon be gone from my life. Who am I crying for? Have I lost someone recently? I can't remember.

It takes me a minute, staring into the brightness, to realise that I was awake. My body feels sweaty and sticky. I'm in a small, damp enclosed square space of plastic that's about as wide as I am tall. The ceiling is only high enough for me to squat, but not stand. There is only one other person inside this space. A blonde woman with grey eyes kneels over me. She's stunningly beautiful, with golden hair, round cheeks, a small chin, and wide oval eyes that held grey orbs.

Who is she? I don't remember. I want to remember. She's someone I haven't lost, right? I'm crying so much that I choke on my own tears. Those grey orbs meet my eyes, and a recognition of familiarity runs through my seaweed brain.

I remember her. How could I forget? She's Annabeth Chase, the love of my life. I could never forget. A single tear falls down my cheek. "I've missed you." I say, confused as to why I said those words at all.

"What do you mean you miss me? I was sleeping right next to you!" Annabeth, annoyed, points at the sleeping bag right beside mine. While I'd been out cold, Annabeth had already rolled her bag up into a neat cylindrical shape and prepared breakfast for the both of us. She handed me a bowl made of stainless steel. Inside is some blueberries, cereal, and various kinds of beans and lentils. She then proceeds to take her own bowl, which is filled with sliced bananas, kiwi, peeled oranges, and other fruits. I dry my eyes and face, before taking the fork she offers me and digging into my breakfast.

"I got a report from the dryads at dawn." Annabeth says. "There hasn't been a reply from the Council of Cloven Elders. There are no plans to send reinforcements to Standing Rock."

All of a sudden I remembered where we were. The North Dakota Pipeline. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The long days spent clinging onto heavy construction machinery and forming human lines against armoured personnel carriers. Drinking sprays of water jets and breathing cannisters of tear gas. This has been my life for the past month.

"How about the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's lawsuit against the North Dakota pipeline? The ruling must have come out last night." I asked.

"Defeated. The district judge ruled that the pipeline may continue operating. Our lawsuit has been dismissed." Annabeth spoke curtly. Then, she added quietly, "Our lives are forfeit."

I ate my breakfast in silence, pondering on our next options. But that lawsuit was the only weapon we had left. Without it, the bulldozers would bury our bodies with the land we tried so hard to defend.

"Percy, come with me." Annabeth said when she saw I was done with my meal. She had stood up and motioned for us to leave the tent. I raised an eyebrow at her.

"We can talk here." I said.

"This tent isn't soundproof. Just come." She insisted. I threw the last grape into my mouth, and followed her. Annabeth cast furtive glances as she dodged campers, tents, uneven ground. She did not stop walking until we were at least a hundred yards away from the outermost edge of the camp. Her breathing was sharp and fast. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, and her mouth agape in terror or confusion, I could not tell which.

"What is it?" I looked around, trying to see what she saw. There was nothing but the smell of hot soups and spices from the camp, and the sight of barren brown soil. "What are you looking at?"

Still she kept staring at some invisible horror, and her fingers began to tremble and quiver. I stood in front of her and grabbed her by both shoulders.

"I had a dream last night." Annabeth whispered, before I could shake her shoulders and scream her name. "But it wasn't like any other dream I'd ever had before."

"Just tell me. We're demigods. Nightmares are like our daily ritual, right?" I grinned, but my face fell when she peered at me with her grey eyes. "Just tell me."

"I was in my room. Back in Camp Half-Blood for winter break. You know how the Athena cabin has one-way windows? There's one facing my bunk, so I get a good view of things happening outside. I dreamt that it was dusk, right after the sun had set, and that I was facing my window. I saw four people gathering outside the cabin; two women, two men. All wearing swimming clothes - bikinis for the women, trunks for the men."

"Okay. So far so good. What was wrong with that?" I interjected. Annabeth's voice lowered even more.

"It was _winter._ Cold enough that I was cold underneath my two blankets and three layers of clothing with the heating in Athena cabin. And they just went around bathing in the snow. And they were old people. One of the men had fully grey hair, and the rest had wrinkles on their bodies. When was the last time a demigod lived to old age, in Camp Half-Blood?"

"Me." I grinned, trying to make light of the situation, but I couldn't make Annabeth smile. And my face fell.

"I felt fear enter my heart, just seeing them. And then they looked at me, where they shouldn't have been able to see, and all four of them pointed at me, all at once. A black raven came out of nowhere and flew through my locked window, and…" Annabeth's words trailed off.

"I don't want to hear more of this. It was a bad dream. Forget it." I interrupted. Still she continued.

"The raven ate me. He bit on my breasts, like I was his meal. Bit me, and masturbated on me, you could say. That's how I knew it was a he. I grabbed him by the throat and ripped him off my clothes. And then I squeezed. Like the way you squeeze an orange, see?" Annabeth made a claw-like motion with her right hand, turning an open hand into a fist with slow, violent intent. I glared at her, making my disgust as plain on my face as I possibly could. Still she continued.

"So I opened the window to throw the corpse outside. Then the raven pissed warm liquid all over my hand as I crushed his bones. He must have been dead, but I went to look at his eyes to check. And you know what I saw?"

"Shut up." I said quietly. She didn't take the hint.

"I saw his eyes. They were black and bulging. At first they were just one eyeball in each socket, but as I stared at him those eyes divided and grew in number. There must have been… seven? Eight? Eight dead, black eyeballs on each side, and they resembled those little blueberries I plucked for your breakfast this morning."

"Shut up!" I repeated, louder this time.

"And Percy, do you know what ravens eat?" Still she continued, and my patience wore thin.

"No, and I don't want to know." I growled. Annabeth opened her mouth to speak, and I clasped my left hand over her mouth. She pulled it off, and opened her mouth to speak again. But instead of words, only a croaking sound emerged. And our eyes were drawn to my right hand, which was now crushing her windpipe with a cruel grip. Annabeth stared at me, stunned and helpless. I try to let go, but the claw stays. I cannot feel my right hand anymore. The claw at her throat is not a part of me. I have to pry _those_ fingers apart with my left hand to release Annabeth's breath.

"Ravens are carrion birds. They eat dead flesh only." Annabeth croaked. As she said that an unearthly roar erupted across the sun-kissed plains, filling my eardrums with its bestial sound the way that you hear a roaring in your ears when they are filled with water. My eyes darted around searching for the hidden apex predator. There was nothing but dirt. The inhuman sound ended, and it was only when I felt my parched lips and strained vocal chords that I realised that the one screaming was me.

"Go back." I uttered, after many long minutes. "Without me. I need to spend some time alone."

* * *

The North Dakota Access Pipeline runs through the Lake Oahe, which is a tributary of the Missouri River that runs adjacent to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Most of the pipeline itself has been built, stretching over one thousand and seven hundred miles from the Bakken shale oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois. That's a drop in the ocean compared to the more than 2.4 million miles of pipeline already in the continental United States. But in North Dakota, resistance was found when the pipeline originally planned to pass through the mostly white town of Bismarck. Instead it was moved south to the Indian reservation of Standing Rock. The risks of an oil spillage was apparently tolerable if it only contaminated water drank by Indians.

At first, the resistance to the pipeline was feeble. A few Indian elders called out for help on social media as they pitched tents in the dark, against the backdrop of a wide and quiet lake. The pipeline was only a few miles away from completion, and it merely had to go through the lake Oahe and a few miles of land to the west, and the resistance would have lost.

Instead, reinforcements came.

From all across America, Native Americans and climate activists gathered at Standing Rock to answer the Sioux tribe's call to defend water against oil. Annabeth and I were one of them.

Every morning, after breakfast, the Native American contingent of the water protesters leave the camp for a pilgrimage to the westmost edge of our battlefield, the eastern end of the pipeline that came all the way from the Bakken shale oil formations. This daily march took less and less time every day. Except for these few miles around the Lake Oahe, every other part of the pipeline had already been built. If there were construction machines lying around, we'd tie ourselves to bulldozers and front loaders and dump trucks until we were arrested or we convinced the construction workers to retreat.

But when I came to the row of First Nations flags, there was no one there except for an idle Asian guy. I recognised him as soon as I saw he wore glasses with a black spectacle band around the back of his head.

"Elijah! Where's everyone else?" I called. Elijah turned to look towards me. He gave me an apologetic grin.

"My latecoming buddy! We're late for the march. Everyone left without us." He stood about 5'7, the tips of his hair reaching my nose. His hair looked like that of somebody who just touched a Van de Graaf generator, all spiking out in a uniform ball like a hedgehog's quills, except his hair was like that all the time. He wore small, black spectacles with a rectangular lens that made him appear intelligent, and added a black spectacle band around the back of his black hair that made him look like a nerd.

"There's never a day without Elijah waking up late to the march, is there?" I smiled and gave him a pat on the back. Elijah was often mistaken for being a Native American because of his black hair and eyes and tanned skin tone, but he was ethnically Chinese. Unlike practically every other water protester here, he was the only one of us who wasn't American. I first got to know him a few weeks ago, when he stumbled into camp pretending to be a tourist. But why here? Why would anyone go to a foreign country to support a side whose war was being fought against the very state itself? A side with no chance of winning?

We walked together, exchanging small talk about the dark grey clouds and the looming winter, before I felt confident we were alone. It was then that I dared to ask him the question.

"So. You've promised to tell me before, when nobody else was around. This is our chance. Why are you here?" I asked. Elijah's grin left his face. With his eyebrows horizontal and his eyes and mouth unsmiling, he seemed like a different person.

"I came here to see what a place without the tyranny of the rich would feel like."

_The tyranny of the rich_. As he said those words, images of the Olympians sitting on their thrones manifested in my mind. Zeus and his frowning, cruel face, holding his jagged lightning bolt with a loose grip from his right hand. Hades, his figure merging as one with his grey and black robes, cradled his silver helm of darkness with one arm. I once tried to broker a deal with the powers that be. But holding gods to their promises requires power in itself, and is not an option for the powerless.

"Say that again?" I asked. Taking a deep breath, and quieting his voice even more, Elijah spoke. When he did, his voice became a dark and forceful bass instead of his usual laughing baritone.

"I came here to witness a place where capitalism does not rule."

_Says the nerd who always wakes up late, and can't cook_, I thought.

"Don't make me laugh." I grinned spitefully. "You came here to get yourself arrested." As soon as I said those words, I regretted it. Elijah stared at me with absolute seriousness for a second, then he broke into a humourless smile.

"Yes, of course! The Singaporean police aren't much to be worried about. All I came this way for was to be handcuffed by American cops!" His voice was back to its singsong baritone, and his smile was a perfect mask. I wouldn't have sensed his humiliation if he hadn't been so serious just a moment earlier.

"That might be happening pretty soon. Did you hear the news about our legal challenge?" I decided to change topics.

"The one that went to the district court? I suppose we lost." Elijah stated without resignation. I raised an eyebrow at how fast he was to concede defeat.

"Yes. We lost. The pipeline will continue operating. And by the gods, you just went through all five stages of depression to acceptance before I even told you we lost."

"What's another defeat to me? I have been embarrassed to the point that I wanted to die more times than I've watched the sun rise in the morning." He turned his face away as he spoke. I laughed again.

"But you never watch the sun rise in the morning. Because you always wake up late." He said nothing in response, but his left hand bawled up into a shaking clenched fist.

I stood and turned back to camp. For the first time today, I realised that my lips were parched and cracked from the dryness in the air. The lack of humidity was a sure sign of winter approaching. Once the snow falls, the marches stop, and the eagle will scatter his prey.

"We're going to witness true violence soon, Elijah. If you ever have second thoughts about getting arrested in America, then leave this camp."

As I walked away, I heard the _splat_ of soil being struck by a fist. _Splat_, _splat_, _splat_. The noise became a crescendo of frustration, a symphony of lament by someone who has never done anything of worth in his lifetime.

* * *

I had woken abnormally late that morning, by my standards. Typically I rose before dawn, so that I could take a solitary walk along the lake Oahe amidst the darkness of the landscape. It was on one such morning that I rose, careful not to awaken Annabeth or any neighbouring camper, and left the camp for my usual stroll. When I was alone along the lake Oahe, with no natural light except the falling moon to guide me, I felt a peace with the living world that I rarely felt at home in New York City. With each breath, I became aware that my life was tied to the land and its grassy plains and its meandering bison, and that together we formed a fabric in the greater artwork of life. There was contentment in the silence of solitude.

As I descended down the banks of the lake, I saw a black figure, sitting without motion or sound, by the edge of the water. The sinking moonlight was too dim, and the sun had not yet risen from the horizon, so I couldn't make out his face. Then the figure raised his left fist, and struck the ground. _Splat. Splat._

And so I knew it was Elijah Lam.

But Elijah Lam, awake before dawn? I rubbed my eyes, but they weren't mistaken. That spiky black hair, the nearly unnoticeable shadow-like spectacle band around the back of his head, and the left fist that desperately struck the ground. His face was masked in darkness, and when he turned to face me I could only see the white in his eyes - the rest of his body was a sculpture of shadow.

I sat down a metre away from him. A cold breeze blew against my nose that smelt of bark teeming with beetles and birds, of an undergrowth of decomposing leaves hiding and nourishing earthworms, of a skyline of leaves each shaped with the uniqueness of a snowflake. It smelt of the wild, and that was good.

"Why are you here, Percy?" Elijah asked suddenly. _Not to get arrested unlike you_, I thought, but I stopped myself. There was a sanctity in this moment. I didn't want to ruin that with sarcasm.

"I'm here to keep a promise." I replied, thinking of Pan, the dead Lord of the Wild. "I promised to defend natural wilderness, whatever of it was left in the world, wherever it would be found." _Even though _you_ gave up, two thousand years ago._

Elijah looked surprised at how little I concealed in my answer. He breathed deeply, and balled his left hand into a fist. Then, he spoke in a hushed whisper.

"I didn't tell you the entire truth, when we talked about why I was here a couple of weeks back. I came here for this fight. I know we're almost certainly going to lose. But I thought that it would make me more worthy, as a man, to stand beside someone precious to me if I took up this fight."

_Oh please_. I thought. The old cynicism returned in force. His voice became more audible, like conversational speech, but it was almost a scream compared to how soft he had been.

"I wish I could have changed something about this fight. But don't forget, Percy." Elijah stood and faced me, his eyes aflame with passion, his voice oozing with reverence. "There are powers greater than this pipeline. There are powers greater than what money represents."

Hearing that made me laugh with a cruel mirth. I raised myself to my full height, and towered above him. With my arms fully outstretched, I raised my palms like a man upon a cross.

"Look at this land, Elijah. Gaze in every direction, as far as you can see. These ageless hills and plains and rivers that were here before even the First Americans. All of it, even beyond the horizon, is private property. When you stand up to capitalism, you stand up to 7 billion people! Our world is owned by money. We who have no money have no power."

He avoided my glare. When he spoke back, his voice was quiet.

"You had someone who would stand against the power of money. A presidential candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination who called himself a democratic socialist…" Elijah countered, but I cut him off.

"Yes, and I voted for him! I ran a campaign office for him, I volunteered for him, I canvassed to hundreds of homes for him, and I donated thousands of dollars of money I didn't have to him!" I shouted. "His platform is forgotten, his revolution has failed. He lost. Every one of you socialists lose in the end."

As I spoke, the dawn broke across the horizon, and light shone on Elijah's face for the first time. I witnessed the face of a savage. The young man's eyes were bulging from the ferocity of his glare and his teeth were bared like an animal's. He stared at me with a primal hatred. And I noticed too, across the shorter man's shoulder, a wave of smoke rising above the horizon, visible even from our low elevation by the side of the lake.

My heart beat faster as I scrambled to higher ground. By the time I had arrived on the flat plains around the Sioux camp, the stench of diesel filled my lungs. I could almost taste the bitter toxins in the air as it invaded my mouth and throat. Its source was still invisible, too far to be seen. But the diesel cloud was several hundred feet wide and at least thirty feet high, approaching at speed, and the faint bellow of distant motor engines gave away its source. It had to be at least twenty, maybe even thirty, vehicles approaching the camp. The width of the black and grey cloud alone indicated a strange breadth in the vehicles' formation. But why would they abandon the road? It took me a precious minute before I realised that they must want to encircle the entire camp itself. This wasn't a routine intrusion into Sioux territory. This was an operation made with the intent of securing total victory.

_We must construct a barricade!_ I turned towards the camp and began to run. As I scrambled across the dirt plains, I cast a glance around me, looking for Elijah. He was not along the lakeside, nor was he on the pathway towards the camp, nor was he behind me, perhaps thinking of doing a stupid last stand on his own against a full battalion.

_Never mind him. He won't be missed_, I thought. With that final glance behind me, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a distant vehicle that looked like a boat on land, with its oversized wheels and ascending hull. An armoured personnel carrier. One of many.

The moment of our annihilation that I had so feared would arrive is here. The promised day has come.

* * *

"The cops are here! They are here!" I screamed as I ran through the Sioux camp. Blurry-eyed protesters peeked through their tents or looked up from their cooking pots. I pointed in the direction of the great diesel cloud emerging from the horizon. The dawn was rising, and through the brightening skies came with it the fumes of invasion. It was a different smell from that of burning charcoal. The chatter and the greetings of "Good morning" and the mixing of soup and even the clanging of cutlery against bowls had stopped. Only the numerous campfires remained audible, hissing like a serpent. My eyes stared into that of my comrades', and I saw on their faces distress and disbelief, and I began to fear that I would not be believed. It was almost too cruel to face the truth.

And then, all at once, the hundreds of exhausted bodies burst into action. People began shouting, pointing, coordinating themselves, moving. Like a wave before it crashes onto the seashore, the silence came before the roar upon impact.

"They're here! We need to build a barricade!" cried a woman from the tent opposite mine, abandoning her meal as she did.

"Everyone with vehicles, use them to form a barricade around the camp!" screamed a man next to a camper van. Another man grabbed my shoulder and asked if I could help carry anything heavy. I agreed, and he took me to a yard filled with stacks of dozens and dozens of large tires. I'd never been happier to see junk tires in my life. For the next half an hour I ran around the camp, hanging one large tire around each of my forearms. I directed anyone who expressed interest to that yard of tires. Even after I exhausted that stack of tires, I received guidance from men and women offering wooden tables, haystacks, blue-and-white ice boxes, the long white poles we used for the flags, and practically anything that looked heavy as material for our barricade. Some even drove their cars and trucks to the perimeter of the camp and abandoned them there.

_This wasn't material specially prepared to be used for a wall. These are our belongings we're sacrificing here_. I thought to myself.

Even without a chosen leader, we protesters began to have something of a coherent strategy. The camp had no walls, but there was only one road coming in and out of it. One of those roads led south into the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's preservation that law enforcement was forbidden from coming into. It was unceded land that had never been part of the United States proper. It was almost certain that there were looser, smaller formations surrounding the camp. Perhaps snipers, or small teams covering a distance of a hundred yards each, would detain any of us who might try to flee the camp itself. But the invasion of the camp itself required a concentrated mass of manpower, a tight formation of many individuals that could only enter through a predetermined route. That route was almost certainly the road that came into Standing Rock Sioux territory from the north - Highway 1806.

At 6:48am, just a few minutes short of an hour since I first saw that great smoke cloud, two battle lines had assembled outside the Standing Rock Sioux camp. On our side was a mishmash of men and women who had all the fatigue and hunger of people who spent most nights awake from anxiety and had just skipped this morning's breakfast. Some of us held the tribal flags. Others beat drums and sang. Others still furiously dragged poles, tables, and anything they could find to reinforce the barricade.

Facing us was an array of fat bellies covered by dark brown uniforms, angry faces covered by transparent face shields, and tear gas sprays covering our eyes in irritant chemicals so thick that they formed miniature clouds.

"Percy!" I heard a female voice yell, and a hand grabbed me by the shoulder. I turned to see Annabeth looking anxiously at me.

"Percy, you have to help me control the crowd." She stated.

"Control the crowd? Why? How?" Annabeth sighed when she saw my confused face. She pointed at the large armoured personnel carriers and the many smaller police cars ahead of us.

"You see that, Percy? Those are for arresting people. They're going to take anyone they can grab, detain us, charge us in court. They'll slap the longest sentences for the smallest things we do. So help me make sure we're totally nonviolent, then there's no sentence to be brought to court! No throwing rocks, no getting into fights!"

With her speech made, Annabeth sprung to action. She grabbed a man holding a stone in his hand by the wrists. She put her hands on the shoulders of another male protester who carried a baton. She pulled a woman who was being grabbed by the police troopers away from arrest. I followed her, trying to calm down those on our side, trying to negotiate with those on their side.

"Keep your distance! Don't provoke them! Don't throw things at them!" Annabeth yelled at our fellow protesters. For several minutes I did not see one stone being thrown by our side, and in that time I saw many tear gas canisters fired indiscriminately in our faces, but the police shield wall closed down on us and began swallowing anyone in front who was too cornered to run away.

Annabeth was in a shouting match with a shorter man. I could barely make out the phrases "beating us", "fight back", and "don't have a chance". I shouted for everyone to remain peaceful, but my voice sounded like a whisper compared to the noise around me.

_BANG! BANG!_ Ear-piercingly loud shots screeched through the air, and I spotted a smoking gun barrel, pointed into the sky. The shouting and yelling and pushing ended, and we protesters became quiet, quiet enough to hear some nearby bird sing its morning chirp.

In my mind's eye, I imagined a colossal wave that was as high as a five storey building gathering a silent momentum as it bore down its gargantuan mass upon an unsuspecting white beach. As it raised its watery maw to chomp down its prey, it let loose a roar that seem to gurgle all the way from the deepest abyssal trench, so deep and loud and cold that my heart shivered in fright.

That very same roar ripped into my ears as I became conscious once again of the outside world, so piercingly loud that all actions ceased and all eyes searched for the epicentre of the bestial sound. Mine were drawn to a haystack of armoured bodies, three men scrambling to their feet, two more elevated five foot above the ground.

There was none other than Elijah Lam, carrying two huge troopers, one across each shoulder, whose combined weight, armour and equipment included, must have exceeded three times his own bodyweight. He stumbled forward a few steps, but a third trooper kicked him in the heel of his right foot, and he tumbled to the ground.

As they subdued him, a single trooper took a single step forward. He was followed by the rest of his front line. And then they stepped forward again. Again. And once more they stepped forward, their shields at the ready and their rifles and pistols raised.

_The dumbass!_

The ranks of shields and armour grew bigger and bigger as they began their merciless march. I could still hear Annabeth's voice faintly, pleading for nonviolence. That picture of the rising, roaring colossal wave hanging above a peaceful beach came unsummoned to my mind. And then, as a predator falling upon his prey, the tsunami of shields and armour fell upon the shore.

* * *

A battlecry rippled through their phalanx as they crashed shield-first into our lines. I caught a glimpse of a small woman at the front being flung to the ground and jumped upon by those boots, and then I too received the charge. It was too fast to see. I had the brief sensation of my centre of gravity not being between my feet. The next thing I knew I was on my back, covered in mud, surrounded by boots. They stomped on my ribs, my knee, my diaphragm. I scrambled to my hands and knees, but already there was a heavy boot upon my neck. With the swift motion that panic grants a person I clawed that terrible weight off my neck, and pushed off the ground with my hands to rise to my feet.

A stinging pain oozed through the back of my head, and I stumbled. Then that sting erupted, and my vision blurred. I turned to see a cop with a baton, swinging at the most vulnerable part of my head behind the ears. With rising anger I grabbed his baton as he brought it down once again, and attempted to twist it out of his grasp. The wrestling took me within inches of his helmed face that was livid with the expression of one who felt wrongfully transgressed. His lips parted to reveal chipped and yellowed teeth and a white tongue in between, but I heard no beastly roar emerge from it, because at that moment my vision turned into a pale, ghoulish white.

That white cloud bit my nose, my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my cheeks like a thousand shards of glass piercing the skin on my face, all at once. _Pepper spray!_ I realised it in an instant. I had never encountered it before, but fellow protesters had spoken with dread of the immense power of the pepper spray, and how it made your mucus run uncontrollably down your lips as you lost your sense of balance, your control over your own breathing, and even your sight, sometimes for as long as an hour. In an instant I released the baton and fled.

I ran zigzagged, half blind and confused, trying to summon water to wash my face with. I felt the dull thud of batons beating my ribs, and the strain on my knees that running so haphazardly on such uneven ground took. But the foremost sensation I was aware of was something akin to the sting of a million fire ants on my face devouring my flesh whole. The voices, angry and fearful, loud and soft, all at once sounded distant. It was time to treat my wounds. I felt dampness on my hands as my demigod powers summoned water from thin air, and doused myself in it. The pain did not recede. _More water!_ I washed my face again and again until my boots were soaked with many litres of runaway water emerging from a phantom fountain. Even then, I could barely open my eyes to see the blurred world around me. Mucus flowed freely from my nostrils, I kept gagging in order to breathe, a fierce headache bounced in the inside of my skull, and the biting burn persisted on all the skin on my face.

Only now did I manage to gaze around my surroundings and take measure of the full scale of our defeat.

They had pierced through our makeshift barricade of hay and wood, through our interlocked arms and bodies, and in despair we had turned our backs and fled. For some attempted pleading and negotiation before they were marched off with bound wrists trapped behind their backs, for others they hid in their camper vans and tents. But there would be no stalling the work of the arresters; they threw tear gas canisters into tents and invaded their sleeping quarters to drag out the unresisting.

Even with our defenses broken, still I witnessed scenes of camaraderie amongst the protesters. Two men uncorked their water bottles to douse a gas canister in a tent. A small group of protesters clung beneath an upturned canoe that had once served the purpose of travelling the lake Oahe, and now shielded them from the rioting police. Others formed a temporary medical shelter, a large open-air tent covering half a dozen figures standing who were treating half a dozen figures sitting, a queue with around them, and beneath that tent were bundles and bundles of plastic surrounding bandages, gauze, ointments, and countless other first aid items I couldn't name. From the motions of the blurry outlines of one person standing as he touched the face of another protester, I gathered that they were treating protesters who had been attacked by pepper spray and tear gas. Relieved, I made my way towards that open-air tent.

Once there, I waited for the three or so people ahead of me in the queue to finish their treatment before a medic waved at me to come over. Two of the other patients had similar pepper spray injures to my own, but the last one had visible maroon gashes in the skin above her left eyebrow that was big enough to stick a digit of my thumb in. My medic was a middle-aged Native American man, with those dark brown eyes that reminded me of Asian people, and brown skin. His black hair was tied in a bun, and he carried a kind grin across the sagging creases on his face.

"How may I help you, my brother?" He asked. I tried to speak, but instead a horrible itch rose through my throat, and I turned my face away from him to cough harshly. I used my right hand to make the motion of squeezing the nozzle of a pepper spray can with the index finger. "Ah, pepper spray. Don't worry, I have just what you need."

He grabbed a carton of white milk, uncorked it, and instructed me to close my eyes as he poured it on my face. As he did so, I felt my shirt stick to my chest and the sensation of stickiness permeate throughout my face and neck.

Then the darkness of my shut eyelids was pierced by some bright orange flash, and a _crack_ and a cry was not concealed by the sloshing liquid filling my ears. I opened my eyes, and my vision was filled by a muddy red hue. It tasted sick and bitter.

"Medic!" I yelled through the gurgling saliva and milk and blood in my mouth. I could only see his face at an angle beneath his chin, but even then and through the milk and blood and pepper spray I could see the ominous crimson waterfall flowing down his cheek.

"Don't move brother, I'm not done treating you yet." The calm voice of the bloody medic instructed. "Time is the best medicine to recover from the effects of pepper spray."

After another long moment the stream of milk ended, and I blinked until the medic's face became clear. In place of his right eye, he had a white cylindrical object grotesquely hitting out from his eye socket, and he was emitting orange smoke from that socket like a campfire. Streams of blood flowed freely down his right cheek. _A direct tear gas canister hit!_ I realised.

"Alright. You are good to go, brother." He turned to the queue. "Next patient!"

I stumbled away from the tent horrified. But I wasn't done yet. The cops were eager to uproot and destroy every structure in the camp, and that especially meant the tents that people lived in. I'd lost track of Annabeth too, ever since the initial charge. Guessing that both of us had the same priorities in mind, I ran towards our tent in the outskirts of the assaulted camp.

When I found her, Annabeth stood in front of three riot cops who were all at least half a head taller than her, guarding our tent. Before I could reach her, one of them grabbed her by the waist, and hurled her aside.

My rage was stirred, a guttural roar came out of my throat, and I charged headfirst at the nearest riot trooper. But as soon as I came within five feet of him, Annabeth leapt in and caught my momentum with her own body. We tumbled over each other.

"Let me have them! Let me kill them!" I screamed. Annabeth felt so warm as she hugged me tightly. She was weeping softly into my shoulder. I knew what she was asking of me, begging of me. But stillI I snarled and gnashed my teeth as my hatred burnt like the Sioux camp itself.

A cop pulled out a fire starter that looked like a handgun with a lab tube for a barrel and a tiny nugget-shaped handle, and held it against our tent. A _click_ sound, and a small blue flame appeared at the end of the barrel. He let it make contact with our tent, and the blue and green structure received a new dye of orange and red that spilled from its base to its ceiling.

Inside that tent was a hundred different belongings that were important to us. We kept in there a handwritten list of the names, addresses, and details of our arrested friends, for the purposes of assisting them with bail and lawyer money in future. That list had grown to nearly twenty pages long over months of writing. Then there were important documents to keep. Our tax forms. My driver's license. Our passports. The lease papers for our rented flat in San Francisco. A keychain holding all our spare keys for that flat. Stacks of loose cash that represented most of our savings.

And then there were sentimental objects. A friend we made at the camp had a Polaroid camera that produced instant hardcopy photos. She took several photos of us during the daily marches, prayers, and communal meals that we kept in our tent. On the day she left, she gave us those photos as a souvenir. But for some reason or another, she had never been in any of those photos, and my memory of her was faint. I can't even recall her name. I only recall a petite, Asian woman with a round face and a mellow, gentle voice.

The fires on our tent had grown now, and in its dims and flickers I saw a yellow morphing beast that seemed to delight in destruction. There was nothing to be saved, everything is gone, there was nothing we have done, everything has been lost!

Now the three huge troopers surrounded us, and like drummers in a rock band they swung their batons with electric passion and rapid rhythm. My head was their cymbal, to be smacked by a baton. Annabeth's spine was their tom rack, and her neck their snare drum. A heavy boot crunched down on my outstretched palm, cracking my fingers, and my cry was their bass drum. For several long minutes this ragtag band played their bone breaking music, until they found their drum set made no more cries when struck, to which they responded by handcuffing us with our arms behind our backs.

We were barely conscious of being walked out of the camp and taken into the rear of a large Paddy Wagon, a police carrier designed to hold a dozen restrained prisoners in the backseat at a time. Already there were many others inside. Annabeth and I sat shoulder to shoulder on a thin, uncomfortable bench. For a time neither of us spoke, or was even conscious of each other.

Then I tasted something warm and bitter in my mouth. By instinct I swallowed it back. That unknown entity lit a fire down my throat. For the first time in a while I could see Annabeth's face clearly, staring at me.

"Percy, you're blue and black all over," she croaked, then she too coughed again and again, until a slimy black liquid oozed through the faint, concerned smile on her lips.

"What is…" I tried asking, but gurgled in my mouth. I kept my lips shut tight, but saliva or some other liquid trickled out my lips and down my chin.

"Expired tear gas. Its chemical composition degraded from being kept too long. It's poisonous. Phosgene and dioxin. Maybe cyanide." Annabeth said, before coughing even more. Every cough seemed to irritate her throat more, and she coughed with such escalating vigour that I feared she would lose her ability to speak if her coughing persisted.

I turned to the trooper standing at the paddy wagon's exit. His emotionless eyes looked at Annabeth, and then me.

"Help us!" I cried. By now the black liquid trailing down Annabeth's mouth had formed a little obsidian puddle on the floor. She made beastly screeches of "Kraaaagh" and "Ekekekekek" as she fought to breathe. "She can't breathe!"

The trooper put a hand against his own neck. In a cruel mimicry he stuck his tongue out, said "Bleeergh", and pretended to choke. Then he grinned as Annabeth continued to struggle. His mockery complete, he turned and watched the spectacular world outside these iron doors where law and order ruled.

Beyond the door was a sacking of Sioux land as there had not been since the massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890, when almost three hundred Sioux, many of them women and children, slumped in mass graves before the machine guns and artillery of the US Army. A hundred fires had now been lit, each at least the size of a man, each dancing atop a sacked Sioux tent. Their soft, queer shapes formed a ghostly guard of honour for the captured protesters whose bodies were dragged by force into a fate in chains.

Some of them would cry to their skyward forefathers, but the smoke rising from this parade of fiery ghosts billowed and turned the clear blue sky gray, and the sky was silent. It was as if they wished to say, "_We cannot help you. We lost here too_."

Such was the fall of the Standing Rock Sioux, their lands conquered by the white man and his weapons in the twenty-first century just as their ancestors' had been in the nineteenth. Amidst the ruins of their camp, they begged for mercy where they would find none, they sought safety from a ruthless annihilator in his own fortress, and vain were their efforts, as old and young all were marched off in restraints.

* * *

That day, one hundred and forty-one water protesters were arrested at Standing Rock. We would be held on the highway in handcuffs for hours, stripped of our clothes, and had identification numbers written on my arms. I remember mine well for its religious significance - 1666. We were loaded onto school buses and shipped to jails across the state, some of us still in our underwear and barefoot. Annabeth and myself got off with heavy fines, perhaps because we were white. The Native Americans were not so lucky. The friends that we kept in contact with had their lawyers fighting years-long prison sentences and charges of felony, assault, and many more.

On the 8th of November 2016, the United States presidential election yielded an unexpected victor. The Republican Party's candidate defeated the Democratic Party's candidate by the narrowest of margins - several tens of thousands of voters in crucial Northwestern states giving them the victory in the delegate race. And so the new Republican president would win an election without winning the popular vote. The new presidential-elect had never held elected office, held deeply authoritarian views on immigration and public policy, and had all the charisma of a reptile. He appealed to hate of the foreigner, division between Americans, and championed policies so racist that accurate comparisons of his persona to Hitler could be made. And the worst part?

He came from New York, just like me.

Within weeks of his swearing into office, he unravelled everything we had fought for at Standing Rock for months. The North Dakota Pipeline was duly approved. The Sioux were dispersed from their camp, and the coalition of water protesters diminished in number.

In late January 2017, Annabeth and I made one more visit to Standing Rock. We departed from the nearby town of Bismarck in the morning, then drove in our rickety old truck along Highway 1806, carefully driving so as not to skid on the ice-covered roads. We first saw bulldozers and excavators upon the hills, still digging up soil to make way for the pipeline There were remnants of barbed wire, burnt-out cars, upside-down USA flags and a yellow flag with a snake in its centre, many signs with "NO DAPL" graffiti on top of it, wooden planks of all sizes. There was nothing out of the ordinary, no tents or teepees or camp fires or camper vans or cars. No sign of life anywhere. Where was the camp? Where were the protesters?

We went on and on for a minute longer after seeing such rubble before Annabeth realised.

"Percy, stop."

I stared at her like she was crazy.

"We're already here. This is the Standing Rock Sioux camp."

We stopped the truck and walked out. Now that I was no longer driving, I could take in the scenery rather than have it pass by like a fleeting dream.

The hills were a white blanket of snow, the plains were a spilled rubbish bin of cardboard, rusting metal sheets, poles, buckets, and many other kinds of garbage I could not name. Gone were the muddy footprints from the daily marches of hundreds of protesters. Gone were the many flags of the first Americans, waving proudly against gusts of wind. Gone was the smell of charcoal and cooked meat. Gone was the warmth of huddled bodies around a fireplace. Gone were the strange sounds of songs and prayers sung in Native American languages I never heard of.

The only noise I could still hear was the _thunk, thunk_ of excavation machines, digging out soil to lay down more of the oil pipeline.

"We lost." Annabeth answered a question I had not asked. "That's what happened."

A strange sensation came to my fingers, and I watched my right hand as it made an outstretched claw, pointed towards Annabeth's direction, and made a slow squeezing act until it formed a fist. I then pictured myself sitting atop a beautiful woman with blonde hair and grey, dead eyes. Tears streamed down my cheek as I tried to remember who I had lost. And then the memory of a months-old nightmare returned.

_By the gods_…

_I_ held her throat and squeezed. Me! _But that was a dream,_ I reminded myself. Then a vision appeared in my mind's eye, of the time I had reacted to Annabeth's retelling of her dream of four strangers in Camp Half-Blood wearing swimsuits during wintertime and the raven with many eyes like blueberries.

I saw Annabeth's pained face just mere centimetres away from mine, her soft lips forming silent pleas, as my cruel hands gripped tighter around her slender neck.

And that was a memory.


	3. Chapter 3

The highway along the Berkeley Hills is sparsely congested, with hardly a car or van in sight. Look out the window of your cab, and one can see a great expanse of towering mounds of soothing green, waving up and down against the horizon, decorated with thick bushes and trees of myriad shapes. Hidden from human eyes by both Mist and mountain, just behind that shroud of nature, would be New Rome, home to the direct descendants of the Roman gods. I eyed flat, smooth grass about thirty metres ahead that would be a good place to drop off.

"Stop right at that field ahead." I raise my finger to point as I instructed the driver. The old Hispanic man stared at where I was pointing, then bewildered at the curious drop-off point, stared at me with a furrowed brow.

"This your idea of a vacation, young man?" He asked. _Actually, we're moving house._ I thought about saying, but that would explain even less. "Yes it is." I smiled.

We stop, going off road a little, and take out the luggage. We have five thick suitcases between Annabeth and myself. As I settle the fees, the driver leans in close and lowers his voice.

"I don't know about you son, but your missus there seems a little pissed. Hopefully old Berkeley Hills can cheer her up!" I glanced at Annabeth, sulking a distance away from and completely ignoring the luggage. The past few weeks have been rough for both of us, but especially her. I scrounge up a frighteningly large majority of the cash in my wallet and settle the bill with no change left over. With that our driver takes off and I walk over to Annabeth.

"Tell Frank we're here." She snaps. I sighed, and dropped him a quick text. And so we waited, watching the the bright white clouds pass by.

It's March 2017. Once we fought off our court cases, Annabeth and I thought we would resume life as usual. We were wrong. Our employers found out about our involvement in Standing Rock. I was retrenched with no settlement fee, and couldn't get another job. I couldn't even get an _interview_. Every prospective employer must have thrown out my application as soon as they saw that arrest record. For Annabeth it was the same, but as a freelance architect, that meant that her project requests dried up. Two hundred job applications later, we ran out of savings to pay for our flat. San Francisco is an expensive city, and Annabeth's architect job paid most of the bills. We already didn't earn much but going behind on rent settled it. The choice to leave San Francisco was hard, especially for Annabeth. Being here was the culmination of our American Dream and leaving here meant that we had failed. We took what savings we could salvage and fled the city before the banks came for their dues. And now we were back here, in Camp Jupiter, a homeless demigod couple looking for a home.

In our wait for Frank, we watched the many-faced clouds remind us of friends who had crossed the bridge to the Underworld before we. We turn twenty five years old in the year 2017. That is a quarter century of being hunted, being hated, having loved, having lost. Mortal youth is not demigod youth, the end stage of our journeys is not cancer at eighty years old but rather the claws and teeth of a hellhound at fifteen years old. I am young, but I have lived a very long time.

The sound of rustling leaves take me out of my reverie. From the groves emerged a gigantic black nose as large as my skull, then bloodshot eyes and an extended white snout as long as my arm and a maw of teeth that could snap half my body in one bite. The beast continued to emerge. It was some kind of monster polar bear that stood on all fours at my height, and its body stretched out at least twenty feet long. _That thing is twice the size of any normal polar bear!_ I thought.

At first, even I was scared. But it came to my mind that Frank was a shapeshifter, and that there were no polar bears in springtime California wandering in the wild. So I summoned my courage, and waved at the gargantuan white beast.

"Thank you for welcoming us, Frank. And thank you to New Rome too." I said. The monstrous white bear morphed into a hulking, big and tall Asian man. Annabeth breathed a sigh of relief. Frank smiled warmly.

"You're an ex-praetor, Percy. New Rome will always welcome you." He then scratched his head as he gave me an apologetic look. "Housing is always a little tight though! I did my best, but we can only offer a spare room in the college dorms."

I sighed in relief. "That's amazing. Here I was thinking we'd be homeless, or have to move in with my mom in New York or her dad in San Francisco."

New Rome was a sight for sore eyes. First we saw the miles long Aqueduct, a grand structure full of arches that brought drinking water into New Rome through gravity alone. We crossed the Pomeranian line, where the god of borders Terminus insisted that he did not recognise me. We checked on old hangouts and favourite spots from our college days. We walked across New Rome's Victory Street, which serves as the highway across the most wealthy houses and the Colosseum and all of New Rome's grandest buildings, leading to the Senate House atop the highest of the seven hills. Along Victory Street were barricades that stretched out for a few hundred metres, starting all the way down at the base of the hill, and many legionnaires scurrying about making logistical adjustments. It was almost as if they had prepared a parade or street festival of some sort. Knowing the Romans, celebration of the highest order would involve the march of the Twelfth Legion.

"I don't remember a traditional Roman festival on the 15th of March." I said.

"The assassination of Julius Caesar." Annabeth interrupted.

"That doesn't count."

"It's the death of a dictator, it should."

"No it is not." Frank agreed. "It isn't a traditional day of festivities at all. This one's special."

We walked away from Victory Street, descended across the hilly streets until the marble arches of the University of New Rome's college dorms came in sight. The University was an all undergraduate college, with no true graduate schools. Demigods who aspired to be lecturers and professors here would do their professional training in schools beyond New Rome, then return here to teach. For those of us who chose to leave New Rome after college like Annabeth and myself, our degrees were somehow accredited to the nearby University of California, Berkeley so that New Rome's existence remained hidden. The Mist truly worked many miracles.

The university itself consisted of many different buildings, each committed to a different faculty - even similar fields like the physical sciences, mathematics, biological sciences, and earth sciences all had their own buildings. Some were open-air buildings with looming pillars and expansive space, others were tightly confined spaces with beautiful ceiling paintings and ornamented sculptures filling every corner of each small room. Classical architecture in the tradition of the ancient Romans demanded that everything be proportionate, well-adorned, and symmetrical. Annabeth explained to me before her hatred of modern architecture and its purposefully ugly design. Our own dorm had a great dome that resembled that of Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, its uniquely expansive design disguising the many small, segmented college rooms inside. We followed Frank into the great domed building.

These halls, these corridors, this floor were all too familiar. We'd lived here in our freshman year. The same eighteen year old neighbours. The same meal planned breakfast. The same fear that the shower tap might not activate running water. It was almost as if we'd gone back in time by eight years. When Frank finally stopped taking turn after turn and presented us with our new home, Annabeth sighed at the same time I did. We both recognised this exact room. Frank apologised again.

"I'll leave you here for awhile. See you at the lobby when you're done!" Frank said. With that, he left us alone in our new home. As soon as the door closed, Annabeth went through our suitcases and took out our graduation certificates from the University of New Rome. They were almost four years old now, but the laminating plastic kept them in the pristine condition they had been in since they were first presented to us.

"Annabeth Chase. Summa cum laude in Architecture honours." A tear slid down her rosy red cheeks as she read. "Percy Jackson. BA in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. No honours." She continued, giggling as she read my certification. "You'd think the fish would have told you all the answers, Seaweed Brain."

"If I could bring fish to the exam hall, maybe I'd have a summa cum laude too!" I laughed. Annabeth giggled for a little while. But the smile left her face, and the same sad look returned. She kept staring at her graduation certificate.

"After all these years, I still haven't made it. I'm still not an architect." She whispered.

"You were. You _are_. You're as good as an architect as I've ever seen." I countered.

"I'm not Vitruvius or Palladio or Laugier. I'm just another jobless graduate. Why did I go to Standing Rock? I should have stayed at home, drawing blueprints. Who cares about the water anyway?"

"I do. And so do you. We were ready to sacrifice everything we had to be there. And we were right to be."

"Four years after graduation, and we're back to my freshman dorm room? By the gods, Percy!" She raised her voice. I sighed deeply. We took a bit longer to rearrange the furniture and suitcases to suit our liking, and put some shampoo and soap in the bath, and put a tissue box on the desk. Once the homeliness was to our satisfaction, we went downstairs to find Frank.

Once we reunited, we found ourselves again in the crowd, even larger than before, packing New Rome to its fullest. Every one of the spiralled and pillared buildings flanking Victory Street was filed with Romans.

"Qui fuit mortuus, et mortuus est! Qui fuit mortuus, et mortuus est!" The crowd cried in unison as the trumpets and drums of the military band roared and the marching contingent came within sight.

"Is there a god visiting or something? Why all the celebration?" Annabeth asks, raising her voice to be heard over the noise.

"Even if Jupiter himself was coming, that doesn't mean the whole of New Rome has to come out and worship him." I said.

"Is there a god visiting?" Frank repeated, then turned and smiled at us. "I guess you could say that."

We three did our best to find a good place to watch the parade. First came the military band, a relatively modern invention that New Romans had taken a liking too, in antique red tunic and sandals that no modern military bandman would be caught dead in. Then came the Senators and other important figures in both New Rome and the Twelfth Legion. The Twelfth Legion and Camp Jupiter had ten senators, consisting of the two praetors and one or two centurions from each cohort. But the larger New Rome itself had a Senate of a hundred that governed even that of the Twelfth Legion. This greater Senate was formed after Camp Jupiter's short-lived war with Camp Half-Blood, as a means to allow older, veteran demigods to influence the politics of New Rome. Amongst them I spied Hazel and Reyna, both in full battle dress, Hazel riding the black equine Arion, Reyna riding her brown Pegasus scipio while she was flanked by her two great automaton hounds, the golden Aurum and the silver Argentum.

_She's done well for herself_, I thought about Hazel. The daughter of Pluto was one of the youngest praetors during her time as a camper, and one of the youngest Senators too when she became a college student. As for Reyna, I had not kept in touch with her since we graduated from college. But she had plans to enlist in the United States Army, where surely her degree in military science would come in handy. Her return here meant the event was more significant still - she was not, if I recall right, a Senator of New Rome. I studied the faces of the rest of the formation. There were a couple of old faces, like Gwendolyn, but I didn't recognise any of the current praetors or centurions of the Twelfth Legion. These were teenagers at least seven years younger than me. In Legion years, that was more than a generation apart.

The bluster and noise of the parade was so loud that I did not catch my name being called. I felt my shoulder being tapped, and turned to see a group of three familiar faces. Two of them were relatively short men, one a Hispanic man with an exuberant grin while the other was a pale white dude with edgy black clothes with holes in them. The third was Native American woman with the most beautiful and symmetrical smiling face a human being could have.

"Welcome to New Rome!" Leo shouts as he gives me a hug. Piper embraces Annabeth, while Nico stays out of it until Annabeth and I give him a handshake and a pat on the back.

"Why is everyone here?" Annabeth gasps in delight. "All of us Seven, plus Reyna and Nico. That's everyone who went on the quest eight years ago…except Jason." She fell into silence as she ended her sentence. I glanced at Piper, Nico, Leo, Frank. All of them were trying to hold back mysterious grins.

"Because a miracle has happened." That was Frank, beaming with glee. Without uttering another word he pointed his right index finger at some distant and invisible object behind the procession that had yet to rise behind the highest Roman hill. The Twelfth Legion had almost fully passed us by now. The parade should be over.

But in the far off distance, the chant had split in two rants, clashing and contradicting, twin different roars in disharmony. "Qui fuit mortuus," both began, but a shrinking number cried "et mortuus est" and an increasing number roared "est et resurrexit". I caught Annabeth staring at me. Her face was a mixture of confusion and a deep-seated anger. We were Greek, but we had both lived in New Rome long enough to understand ancient Latin. As the unseen Morningstar ascended the hill, so did these wails into "est et resurrexit" shrill, echoing across the seven hills of hidden New Rome and even into the evergreen world beyond this Mist guised dome.

When he appeared a thousand voices cried out in spontaneous greeting. I craned my neck and focused my eyes on the horizon of Victory Street from where the hill's slope would end. And across that distance I saw a fiery blonde head and a muscular body supporting it, riding a noble white stallion that towered over most people's heads. He blazed with the fury of the dawn that is every twenty-four hours reborn, for the setting of the sun's fire meant not its everlasting end, so death and funeral pyre to a second life would lend.

The mounted man glanced at our group and smiled and for the first time I examined his face closely. His eyes, a hue of sky blue. His lips, in its centre a scar tore in two. His visage was grim, like a man meant to die. And then he looks away, passing us by.

_It can't be_. I thought.

"He was dead. He _is dead!_" I cried in Latin. Piper glanced at my unbelieving face and shook her head like a parent correcting a small child.

"He _was_ dead. He is _risen_." She corrected me, in fluent Latin. And the chanting continued until the Morningstar made his way to the Senate House, and not even then would it cease, for the Romans had witnessed their greatest miracle since the fall of Carthage and would have the whole world know.

* * *

The march went all the way up to the Senate House, and Frank made clear to us that all five of us were invited to attend as friends of New Rome. The crowds would disperse, but their tongues would carry the news of the miracle. Senate House sat atop the highest of the seven hills of New Rome, its white marble pillars and tall ceiling decorated with images of hideous ecclesiastical beasts that even the most cruel gods had not chosen to unleash upon the mortal world. In this airy forum upon staggered marble benches sat the pagoda of a few, whose staged nodding and stammering hollers imposed binding laws onto you. Our little Greek contingent, plus Frank, joined the Senators and the Twelfth Legion's representatives in taking our seats in the now-deeply packed building. Jason Grace, or his doppelganger, was already standing at the speaker's podium in the centre of the Senate House, keenly watched by all eyes within the building.

When he had seen the last of his select audience arrive, the risen man lifted his torn tunic and threw it upon the floor. I suppressed a groan and averted my eyes, but a collective gasp filled the chamber, and I gazed again at his shirtless figure. At first I saw a very defined six pack, but then my eyes saw what had raptured the attention of the Senate House. Thereupon his chest lay a trifecta of massive, ugly scars almost the size of an outstretched palm each. They suggested a past piercing wound, but the patch of skin ruined was so great that only a shotgun shell or a spear could have done damage like that. Jason turned around, and in his back were three more huge circular patches of loose, scarred skin that roughly corresponded to the positions of the three in front. _The stabs from Caligula's spear!_ I thought.

Then Jason raised his hands. Once again, our chatter and whispers ceased in expectation. Once again, he made us wait. But the observant would notice that sky beyond had turned black and full of dark clouds, and they smelt of something inorganic, like plastic or wires, burning. Then came a white flash that lasted all of a split second, and when it died a blazing firestorm took its place, swallowing Jason as he stood mere metres away from us. The Senate House is filled with wailing and shouting. But in the midst of the inferno, Jason Grace stood there for a long passing minute, his clothes incinerated, his skin not singed, his stern expression undaunted with a gleam of madness in his eyes.

"Let us play a riddle!" He roared. "Lightning strikes do not kill me, my skin fire does not burn. With a thrice pierced body, from death I return. My name, oh… when will the people learn?"

A great applause came rushing in. All around me, people stood and clapped for the risen son of Jupiter. Even I stood and clapped, after Frank gestured at me to do so.

"It is a miracle!" One Senator yelled. "Our Pontifex Maximus has returned to us!" Shouted another. The standing ovation continued for a little longer, then ceased at the raised palm of Jason Grace. By this time the fire and the storm clouds had disappeared as suddenly as they came. But when silence took over, he did not immediately speak. Instead he stood with his arms folded and studied our faces with those glowing blue eyes. As his eyes met mine I felt a chill rise up my spine. A full minute passed before he spoke.

"I suppose I must first answer the question of how I am standing here. After all, many of you attended my funeral. You are correct to assume that I died seven years ago. But the gods have seen fit to call my soul forth for a new mission. I was not allowed to choose rebirth or Elysium. Instead, I was led through the Doors of Death mere months after my death and resurrected. I have been walking amidst you for most of these past seven years."

The startling revelation cast whispers amongst the Romans, but I felt uneasy. It was too simple, too obvious. Still, Jason continued to speak. In a loud roar he declared;

"The gods upon Temple Hill have heard you weep, oh Romans a thousand years from your glory days removed! Their plans I bring for your reward to reap, for the gods' hearts your cries have behooved. We shall bring the Promised Arrival through effort and enterprise! When the glory of the Eternal Roman Empire shall again arise."

And Jason Grace spoke at length about the changes the new Pontifex Maximus demanded of New Rome, effective immediately. One of these was to summon the network of Roman legacies in the wider world, especially those who had worked their way up the worlds of politics, business, and the military. Another was for Camp Jupiter to begin training in the manner of modern militaries, and not a fighting system that died in the age of the arquebus.

Amongst his orders was that every New Roman, from the oldest retiree to the youngest infant, be gathered at the Colosseum in a month's time. To swear their loyalty to him, and also to be part of an unspecified "miracle".

A few of the Senators in the audience rose to ask questions, and being bored from their questions, I chose not to listen to or watch these speakers. But then Annabeth gave me a nudge, and pointed at the current droning speaker.

"Percy, look! That's Grover!" She hissed. _What? Grover? Underwood? Here?_ I wondered. I followed her finger to a tall man in a black suit and tie looking strangely out of place amidst the togas of the other Roman senators. He wore a large, black top hat atop his curly brown hair and had an unshaved goatee on his chin. From afar, he looked like any other well-dressed gentleman, but his gait gave him away. Every time he shifted his "feet", you could hear a loud clopping sound, as if he had hooves instead of feet. He was so unlike the Grover I knew in dressing that it took me a second to realise that Annabeth was right. _What's he doing here?_ I wondered.

Grover had always been an uncharismatic, stuttering speaker who struggled to convince. But within a minute of my listening he actually stroked my anger, and judging from her grim expression, Annabeth's too. First he described himself as "the foremost protector of the wild" and "the leader of all nature spirits and nature defenders". I remembered the many requests for assistance we had made of him over the months in Standing Rock, and the resounding silence from the Lord of the Wild. Then the satyr waxed lyrical about saving the environment and sustaining economic growth and made very little sense as he did so. I was a bad listener, but a quick look at the bored faces around me assured that no one was listening either. A few, painful minutes passed before Grover concluded with a request to "protect and cease degradation, destruction, or damage of all natural wilderness".

"Of course." Jason said. "I bring about this Empire to restore our Earth to its rightful form. Our world will know joy and prosperity when we rid our planet of the locusts."

The satyr nodded, appeased. Then he dramatically left the Senators' benches and ran to Jason's flank near the podium on the Senate House floor. On one knee he went, and pointed to the Pontifex Maximus.

"I, for one, am willing to kneel to our New Roman overlords." Grover said as he grinned at the crowd behind him. Cheers erupted. And then, a loud male voice spoke from within the Senate benches.

"Pledge your lives to our Pontifex Maximus! Pledge your lives to our Eternal Roman Empire!" I turned to see Frank Zhang bellowing at the top of his lungs. Then he descended upon one knee, and crossed his right palm over his heart. With his left arm he pointed his index, middle, and fourth fingers at Jason's chest.

"Three fingers for three mortal wounds to the heart!" He cried, "For our reborn saviour, all New Romans shall march!

All around me, the demigods began to kneel and cover their left breast and point their fingers at Jason's breast. I looked around me to see Annabeth, Leo, Piper, Nico sitting around dumbfounded. But nearly every Roman demigod was doing it, including Reyna, although Hazel remained seated on the benches.

And the slain man who stood before us alive, announced with outstretched arms his foe, who would scheme to cast the fatal blow, to his dream of a Roman Empire revived.

"Our first mission is to annihilate our foremost enemy. They are those who assault the guardians of law and order and resist arrest. They are those who call themselves Antifa, socialists, anarchists, Communists. They, the angry Left, have no place in the Eternal Roman Empire."

And with a glint in his eyes, Jason Grace glanced at me with a hint of a knowing smile.

"They are our foremost enemy."

* * *

When the council of the Senate and its invited guests ended and people began dispersing, Annabeth and I made the same resolution: to confront that satyr, by any means necessary! We excused ourselves from Frank and the Greek demigod group, skipped over reunions with Hazel and Piper, ignored the handshakes offered by the Senators, and went straight for the tall man in a suit and top hat. But Grover moved quickly and the crowd was thick.

We finally caught up with him when he paused outside a cafe to order. I lay my hands on his shoulders from behind.

"You're coming with us, you dumb satyr!" I growled. He screamed bloody murder and kidnapping until Annabeth put her knife against his throat.

"Not another word. We're talking back in the dorms." She hissed in his ear. And so we left just like that, walking through New Rome with me firmly clasping his shoulders from behind, and Annabeth leading him by the hand from in front. A few passerby raised eyebrows, but aside from that we reached our new home unmolested.

By the time we entered our dorm room door, Grover was hyperventilating and quivering at the knees. We gave him the only chair in the room to sit on, while I sat on the solitary bed and Annabeth stood, leaning against the waist-high desk. The satyr looked at his captors, and a slow gleam of recognition filled his eyes.

"Oh. It's you two. Hey Annabeth. Hey Percy." He began, glancing around and taking in his surroundings. "You guys didn't need to go all the way and make me feel like I'm being abducted, okay? Just ask! Also, where is this place?"

"Home sweet home." Annabeth sighed. Grover nodded as he examined our room. The dorm room had no interior toilet, it shared the common showers with the rest of the dorm floor. Even if you took out everything in the room, desk and bed and wardrobe and all the rest, you could perform a standing broad jump from one corner of the room to the other. With the Twin-sized bed, the small unadorned wooden desk, a wooden chair without buttresses for your bum, the wardrobe protruding from the wall, and our luggage, there was barely any space to walk in this room.

"Ooh. Pretty small though! I'd say this counts as undersized even for a one person flat. Maybe it's only meant for a single college student. Am I right? For a couple? Yikes."

Annabeth closed her eyes, put one hand against her forehead, and shook her head in dismay.

"We're only in this place because we lost our home back in San Francisco. Why? Because of our activism at Standing Rock. And your sorry ass didn't do anything about it!" She said with anger on her face.

It seemed to take Grover a minute of silent thinking before he understood the significance of the words "Standing Rock". And when he did, his response was predictably, and disappointingly, lukewarm.

"So this is about the Standing Rock Sioux, I take it? The Sioux only lost their case in court because they used violent protest! Like dude, when your opponent is the US Corps of Engineers, you get it right? They're the military! The US army! And dude, you do not mess with the US Army!"

"You're saying that if we had sat around doing nothing, we might have achieved more than we did?" I demanded, my arms crossed and my voice stern. Grover raised his palms.

"All I'm saying is that the Sioux could have won all on their own if they weren't so violent. If _you_ guys hadn't been so violent. And what were you two there for anyway? You aren't Sioux. You didn't have to be there."

"We are witnesses to the death of Pan. We are inheritors of his legacy.' Annabeth whispered with steel in her voice. "Everywhere that nature is under threat, we of all people should be there! You especially, Lord of the Wild Underwood!"

I sighed deeply in frustration. I had heard Grover's arguments before. From my boss when he sacked me, and from many other friends and prospective employers when they saw my arrest history. But he had none been there - none of them have. It was an academic argument to make that protest or interference did not have to infringe on the missions of the oppressing force. But being there, with the intention to subvert the will of the US Army and the pipeline's builders, there was only increased effectiveness in the escalation of the protest's scope and aims.

I described for Grover at length what it was like to be at Standing Rock. The daily reminders by the Sioux elders to abide by nonviolence and to pray that our enemies would find wisdom. The cruelty of saying goodbye to our arrested friends, knowing we couldn't save them from many days of torture. Then Annabeth interjected, and described what it felt like to be hit by a baton or maced by pepper spray or choke on tear gas. We shared stories about the sharp, cracking pain of the baton, the way pepper spray made your skin feel as if it were burning, how a rubber bullet could lodge itself through bone and flesh, how tear gas made you cough up black liquid. And we finally came to the end of our story with the lifeless remnants of the Sioux protest camp that we saw just a month ago. Then, we explained our reasons for opposing the pipeline.

"If the Dakota Access Pipeline is built, a single, inevitable leak will poison every litre of water from North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico. That's the lives of tens of millions of people we're putting at risk here. When the oil spill inevitably comes, the Sioux and everyone who relies on the Mississippi River for water will drink poisoned water for generations to come. Look at Deepwater Horizon! For five months, a leak poured the equivalent of 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. That's the risk we're dealing with here!" I argued.

Even in the face of the evidence of our lived experiences, the Lord of the Wild had no adverse reactions. He merely sat with a dull look on his face, nodding at odd intervals to acknowledge our story. His lukewarm attitude infuriated me. I stopped talking, because it was clear that the Lord of the Wild had no more interest in listening, and perhaps never did.

"Is it my turn now?" He asked, raising a hand. When neither of us said a word, he continued. "Okay cool. So I was thinking that since you've told your story of what you've been up to since we've last met, it's time for me to do the same! So I've been into stocks…"

"Nothing about Standing Rock? The Dakota Access Pipeline?" Annabeth asked.

"Nope. Just that you protesters being violent and rioting is the problem. That's why you lost."

"Sure." She averted her eyes away from his face. Grover turned to me his face, his eyes filled with glee and his smile as wide as it could go.

"So I've been into stocks recently! Hard stuff, needs lots of attention and thinking, you know? But I was putting money here and there, and I discovered that British Petroleum has been making some pro-environment initiatives! So like, plant a tree for every dollar raised for child poverty, or match the pledges of small donors five times over. Crazy stuff. And it's not just them! All these big corporations, with tens of thousands of employees, earning billions every year, they have pledged their commitment to climate action! So man, it looks to me that all the hard work's already done!" With that Grover stretched out his feet onto the bed while leaning back as far as he could without slipping off the chair.

"I even got this fully paid business trip to Singapore from BP for investing in them! Beautiful city. Full employment, low crime, no politics, luxury facilities everywhere. You could even spend a night sleeping in their public toilets, that's how clean the place is! It's capitalism perfected." The slouching Lord of the Wild grinned and waved his hands as he spoke.

All this talk of wealth and the easy life of luxury made my blood boil.

"Where is the satyr who promised Pan he would bring back the wild? That man awed Juniper with the scale and ambition of his dreams! He told the Council of Cloven Elders he would find Pan when no searcher had in two millennia, and did it! He fought Kronos with reed pipes and helped save Olympus itself! Where is he now?" I yelled.

The Lord of the Wild shrugged and covered his upper lip with his lower lip to give a "I don't really care" expression.

"The wild will come back, Percy. Good things will come later in future. That's capitalism for you. It's good now, it will get better later, and I might as well enjoy this boring life to the most while I'm still alive!"

"You've become a coward, Grover. I once thought you were the bravest satyr I ever knew." Annabeth accused, her tone cold and her expression infuriated as she pointed at him with her right index finger. I nodded in agreement at the second sentiment. "Now you're just another Lord of the Wild. Decadent, lazy, rolling in luxury. A good girl like Juniper should dump you. She cares for this planet far more than you do and your ambitionless goat ass could never satisfy her."

To these words Grover grinned, but it was a horrible kind of grin that I'd never seen him make before, that I'd never imagined him being _capable_ of making. It was a smile of cruelty, a predator's smile to his cornered prey before the beast lunges for the kill. And then the Lord of the Wild used his diaphragm as he spoke so that his voice boomed around our little room.

"I am an alpha male. So when I press her down, she submits to me. When I ask her to do something nicely, she does it. I don't have to shout. She knows her place is beneath my body."

A deep pang of pain pounded in my heart, and I wondered what it was, because I had long ago thought there was no death or suffering in this world that could hurt me any longer. Annabeth's eyes were red, and she pursed her lips as if she was on the brink of tears. After a moment's indecision she whispered, "Get out."

The Lord of the Wild shrugged, rose from his chair, and opened the door. He did not meet my eyes, or Annabeth's, as we watched him leave. And with the sound of that slamming door came an end to our friendship, which had lasted thirteen years for me and eighteen years for Annabeth, as the ally of the wild we first met and supported as children became the annihilator we had grown up to oppose.

* * *

I searched the shelf of Greek and Roman mythology books, adding the few with interesting titles to my carrier bag that was already strained with the burden of nearly a dozen thick tomes. When I was satisfied with my haul, I lifted the bag and walked over to the table where Annabeth sat surrounded by books and studying feverishly.

"I got you another ten or so. Mythology, both Greek and Roman, and ancient Roman history." I said.

"Thanks." She did not look up, caught in the web of her latest book on the politics of the Nero-era Roman empire, as it were.

It had been a week since we had moved to New Rome. We had met with Hazel and Reyna briefly, but the Senators were engrossed in secretive meetings with their new Pontifex Maximus in the Senate House. Just what happened in these meetings were anyone's guess, but two days ago I had come to Temple Hill to pay my respects to Neptune when a legionnaire from Camp Jupiter halted me and said that Temple Hill was being used exclusively by the Pontifex Maximus and the New Rome Senate. Annabeth had a bad feeling about all this. The two of us have been through two Great Prophecies, and the past few days' events stank of the scent of omen. Something big was going to happen very soon, very fast. The daughter of Wisdom sought to find an analogy for the events of the future through the events of the past. Now, she sighed deeply in frustration and pinched her nose.

"Things don't add up, Seaweed Brain. There is something afoot. The gods are planning something that they are not telling us. Something major. The resurrection, appointing a Pontifex Maximus to New Rome, all that is weird but not extraordinary."

"So what in particular caught this 'bad feeling' of yours?" I asked, feeling that I knew the answer before I even asked the question. Annabeth flipped the book she was reading a hundred and eighty degrees so that I could read it, then rose from her seat and leaned over until her face was next to my ear.

"Two things. One, the fact that Jason asked to abandon the traditional Roman way of fighting. New Rome has never modernised the way its demigods have fought. _Never_. We have always fought the same way and with the same technology of Augustus Caesar's legions!" She whispered, pointing at a page in front of me. On it was a dull colored photograph that looked like it came out of the 1980s, depicting Roman demigods in full battle attire fighting a Hellhound. They were armed with pilum, sword, and the rectangular Roman shields. Again she flipped the page, this time to a black-and-white photograph that might have come from the 19th century. Another photos with Roman demigods, again in the traditional legionnaire's garb, posing with a gigantic lion's head. Once more she flipped the pages, this time to paintings in the style of medieval art. In each painting there were monsters of every grotesque combination of limbs and heads from many different beasts forming one chimera, and in each painting there stood Roman demigods with their shields and swords and armor and pilum.

Annabeth glared at me, and I knew the question she wished to ask but feared to say aloud. _Just what kind of enemy were we facing that Camp Jupiter had to modernise its military?_

"And what's the second one?" I asked. Annabeth bit her lip and hesitated, before speaking in a quiet voice.

"The other is that his wounds had the wrong shape."

"What? Whose wounds? What do you mean?" I was thoroughly confused now. Annabeth's eyes widened as I raised my voice, and she shushed me with a finger against my lips. Then she took out her phone, began typing, and indicated that I should take my own phone out. I reached into my pocket, took out my phone, and noticed some WhatsApp messages from Annabeth.

"_I wasn't there when he died, but from what Piper and Apollo have told me, Jason was stabbed through the body repeatedly with a spear. But spear wounds are sharp, like a knife wound. If you paid attention, the Jason we have has round wounds. They're perfectly circular with no sharp edges. That almost implies the spear handle passed through his body, because that's the only circular part of a spear. Even if you penetrated the entire body with the spear tip, the spear handle won't be able to penetrate flesh and bone_." She wrote.

"_I didn't pay attention to the shape of the wounds_," I typed back, "_but assuming you saw his wounds correctly, couldn't it be other things? Scar healing looks funny._"

"_No. Scar healing followed the shape of the pierced skin. It might be saggier here and there, but the shape itself implies the penetration of the spear handle, which is impossible."_

I still wasn't convinced. _"Maybe Caligula was freakishly strong. Maybe all his stabs did send the spear handle passing through bone._" I typed back.

"_Even then, the wound still doesn't match. Did Jason's body come back with Caligula's spear still inside him?"_ She asked.

"_Of course not."_ That was a ridiculous question. Caligula himself removed his own spear. What were the odds of Camp Half-Blood getting a free addition to the armoury like that?

"_Recall that the spear tip has edges to it. When it pierces skin, it leaves two sharp extremities in the shape of the wound. When it enters, it makes one set of extremities and when it exits, it makes another. Even a spear wound with the handle inside your body must have an uneven shape: circular but with two, maybe four edges caused by the entry and exit of the larger spear tip."_

"_Then the spear tip was smaller than the handle itself!"_

"_I'll humor you. If the polearm's head was that small, then it striking with the power of a force so powerful that the handle itself went through would have surely broken off the spear tip. We didn't see a spear tip in Jason's body. You can ask any of the Hephaestus boys this. Small polearm heads break off easily, so unless you're making a throwing javelin, you don't do small heads. Besides, since when did any polearm in history have a head smaller in diameter than its own handle?"_

I was about to write something back, but Annabeth had conclusively proven her case. What was she trying to say? That we had a fake Jason, a fraud, a doppelganger, in front of us? And the gods were planning to make the Twelfth Legion go to war with some unfathomably powerful unknown enemy behind the leadership of an imposter? The possibility of the new Pontifex Maximus being some kind of fake sent shivers down my spine. I feared for the future of New Rome if this were true. Annabeth went back to her books, but I mindlessly browsed the Internet, while her words echoed in the back of my mind.

Somewhere in the middle of searches for modern prophecies and conspiracy theories and visions of the future, I found a Reddit page for prophesized events. In the year 2017, Reddit is the world's largest online forum, with hundreds of millions of users and countless smaller forums, known as subreddits, encompassing an uncountable number of different topics. This particular subreddit was something like a forum for the Oracles of Delphi. It focused on prophecies that users gave of their own accord - some through their visions, others through the visions of someone they knew. There was a lot of distrust amongst these amateur prophets and soothsayers. It was hard to verify that predictions of the future had come true, often because users declared they had foreseen some current event years ago without proof, or because their prophecies were intentionally so vague in wording that any number of events could satisfy the prophecy they made. So whenever a user made specific, difficult-to-misinterpret prophecies that came true, a mini-cult tended to spring up around them.

In particular, a new user was gaining notoriety. Going by the username "John Brown", he had gained notoriety for correctly predicting several events in the past few years that had come as seismic shocks to those who experienced it. u/JohnBrown foretold that the Leave campaign would win the referendum on the question of Great Britain's exit from the European Union. He not only correctly predicted the current President's electoral victory back in mid-2015, he even correctly chose the margins of victory in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Florida. All these were the battleground states that nearly no analyst predicted would go to the Republican Party. Furthermore, the election itself was in 2016, and in the middle of 2015 the current President and his election campaign was seen as a loathed dark horse even within the Republican primaries. He was an outside shot of an outside shot. But u/JohnBrown wrote of the future with the certainty of a historian, and was proven correct nevertheless.

In the hours we spent at the library of New Rome University that day I began following this mysterious John Brown closely. He had a cult following, but did not wield his influence as a cult leader like the QAnon conspiracy might. When he posted, it came with a warning.

_"Take care of yourselves. The time of dictatorship lies ahead."_

And there too was a mystery about John Brown. He never predicted anything past the year 2020. Before the end of that year he could pick out sports results to the precision of the goals scored in each knock-out tie, but he refused to prophesize events beyond that year. Some called him a fraud.

The long hours of the afternoon passed uneventfully, as Annabeth gorged through her tomes and I flicked the touchscreen of my phone. We ate lunch, bought drinks, returned books, but spoke little to each other. At around 4pm, by chance I caught u/JohnBrown in an "Ask Me Anything" session on a subreddit named after him. He had done this before, but it was my first time seeing one live. The questions shot in, and John Brown answered where he could. To the question of whether the President's planned thousand mile long southern border wall would be built, he answered that while no physical wall would be built, a combination of destruction of amenities in desert regions and a ruthless immigration agency rounding up illegal immigrants would ensure much the same effect. To the question of whether Real Madrid might become the first club to successfully defend their Champions League title, he answered that not only would they succeed, but they would succeed again as well the year after, therefore performing a historical "three-peat". To the question of whether Jean-Luc Melenchon and Jeremy Corbyn, the leading French and British radical leftists respectively, might ever come to power, he assured that neither would not. To the question of whether Arsenal would ever win the Premier League again, he replied that such was the mediocrity of the club that he had not heard of them before.

I felt emboldened by the many questions, most of which were asked almost in jest and promptly ignored, and wrote my own.

_"What is the chronologically furthest into the future vision that you can see?"_ I wrote. And then Annabeth asked me to run an errand of returning old books and picking out new ones, so I left my phone for a few minutes. I returned with a subtle premonition in my chest, of excitement mixed with fear, like I knew something bad was going to happen but embracing it anyway. My comment had somehow become gilded, awarded, and upvoted to the top of the thread within mere minutes. Below it was the username that had become shrouded in infamy.

_"December 2020, around Christmas. Nothing more."_ Beneath his reply were many threads debating the meaning of this answer, asking follow-up questions, calling him a fraud. I typed back a response.

_"What's that final vision that you had, taking place in Christmas 2020?"_ With great anticipation I waited as my comment grew in upvotes and awards and golds. I refreshed the page once, and twice, and then so many times that I lost count. Not a reply. But out of the corner of my eye I noticed I had received a private message. It came from u/JohnBrown. I opened it, to find only a single line.

_"Take care of yourself. The time of dictatorship is coming."_


End file.
